John Powys - Rodmoor

The deep crimsons and purples in the coloured windows, the damp chilly smell of the centuries-old masonry, the large dark recesses of the shadowy transepts, all blended together to transport her out of herself into a world kindlier, calmer, quieter, than the world she knew.

“And — he — shall — feed—” rang out, as they listened, the clear flutelike voice of some boy-singer, practising for the morrow’s services, “shall — feed — his — flock.”

The words of the famous antiphony, “staled and rung upon” as they might be, by the pathetic stammerings of so old a human repetition, were, coming just at this particular moment, more than Nance could bear. She flung herself on her knees and, pressing her hands to her face, burst into convulsive sobs. Sorio stood up and laid his hand on her shoulder. With the other hand — mindful of early associations — he crossed himself two or three times and then remained motionless. Slowly, by the action of that law which is perhaps the deepest in the universe, the law of ebb and flow , there began in him a reaction. Had the words the unseen boy singer was uttering been in Latin, had they possessed that reserve, that passionate aloofness in emotion, which the instinct of worship in the southern races protects from sentiment, such a reaction might have been spared him; but the thing was too facile, too easy. It might have been the climax of a common melodrama. It fell too pat upon the occasion. And it was insidiously, treacherously, horribly human. It was too human. It lacked the ring of style, the reserve of the grand manner. It wailed and sobbed. It whimpered upon the Almighty’s shoulder. It wanted the tragic abandonment of the “Dies Irae,” as it missed the calmer dignity of the “Tantum ergo.” It appealed to what was below the level of the highest in religious pathos. It humiliated while it comforted. The boy’s voice died away and the organ stopped. There was a sound of shuffling in the choir and the mutter of voices and even a suppressed laugh.

Sorio removed his hand from Nance’s shoulder and stooping down picked up his hat and stick. He looked round him. A fashionably dressed lady, carrying a bunch of carnations, moved past them up the aisle and presently two younger women followed. Then a neatly attired dapper young clergyman strolled in, adjusting his eye-glasses. It was evidently approaching the hour of the afternoon service. The spell was broken.

But the kneeling girl knew nothing, felt nothing, of all this. She, at all events, was in the church of her fathers — the church that her most childish memories rendered sacred. Had she been able to understand Sorio’s feeling, she would have swept it aside. The music was beautiful, she would have said, and the words were true. From the heart of the universe they came straight to her heart. Were they rendered unbeautiful and untrue because so many simple souls had found comfort in them?

“Ah! Adrian,” she would have said had she argued it out with him. “Ah, Adrian, it is common. It is the common cry of humanity, set to the music of the common heart of the world, and is not that more essential than ‘Latin,’ more important than ‘style’?”

As a matter of fact, the only controversy that arose between them when they left the building was brief and final.

“I fancy,” remarked Sorio, “from what you tell me of her, that that’s the sort of thing that would please Mrs. Renshaw — I mean the music we heard just now!”

Nance flushed as she answered him. “Yes, it would! It would! And it pleases me too. It makes me more certain than ever that Jesus Christ was really God.” Sorio bowed his head at this and held his peace and together they made their way to the bank of the Loon.

What they were particularly anxious to see was an old house by the river-side about a mile east of the town which had been, some hundred years before, the abode of one of the famous East Anglian painters of the celebrated Norwich school — a painter whose humorous aplomb and rich earth-steeped colouring rivalled some of the most notable of the artists of Amsterdam and The Hague.

Their train back to Rodmoor did not leave till half-past seven and as it was now hardly five they had ample time to make this little pilgrimage as deliberately as they pleased. They had no difficulty in reaching the river, and once at its edge, it was only a question of following its windings till they arrived at Ravelston Grange. Their way was somewhat impeded at first by a line of warehouses, between which and a long row of barges fastened to a series of littered dusty wharves, lay all manner of bales and casks and bundles of hay and vegetable. There were coal-yards there too, and timber-yards, and in other places great piles of beer-barrels, all bearing the name “Keith Radipole” which had been for half a century the business title of Brand Renshaw’s brewery. These obstacles surmounted, there were no further interruptions to their advance along the river path.

The aspect of the day, however, had grown less promising. A somewhat threatening bank of clouds with dark jagged edges, which the efforts of the sun to scatter only rendered more lurid, had appeared in the west and when, for a moment, they turned to look back at the town, they saw its chimneys and houses massed gloomily together against a huge sombre bastion whose topmost fringe was illuminated by fiery indentations. Nance expressed some hesitation as to the wisdom of going further with this phalanx of storm threatenings following them from behind, but Sorio laughed at her fears and assured her that in a very short time they would arrive at the great painter’s house.

It appeared, however, that the “mile” referred to in the little local history in which they had read about this place did not begin till the limits of Mundham were reached and Mundham seemed to extend itself interminably. They were passing through peculiarly dreary outskirts now. Little half-finished rows of wretchedly built houses trailed disconsolately towards the river’s edge and mingled with small deserted factories whose walls, blackened with smoke, were now slowly crumbling to pieces. Desolate patches of half-cultivated ground where the stalks of potatoes, yellowing with damp, alternated with thickly growing weeds, gave the place that peculiar expression of sordid melancholy which seems the especial prerogative of such fringes of human habitation. Old decaying barges, some of them half-drowned in water and others with gaunt, protruding ribs and rotting planks, lay staring at the sky while the river, swirling past them, gurgled and muttered round their submerged keels. It was impossible for the two friends to retain long, under these depressing surroundings, their former mood of magical harmony. Little shreds and fragments of their happiness seemed to fall from them at every step and remain, bleakly flapping among the mouldering walls and weedy river-piles, like the bits of old paper and torn rag which fluttered feebly or fell into immobility as the wind rose or sank. The bank of clouds behind them had now completely obscured every vestige of the sun and a sort of premature twilight lay upon the surface of the river and on the fields on its further side.

“What’s that?” asked Nance suddenly, putting her hand on his arm and pointing to a large square building which suddenly appeared on their left. They had been vaguely aware of this building for some while but one little thing or another in their more immediate neighbourhood had confined it to the remoter verge of their consciousness. As soon as she had asked the question Nance felt an unaccountable unwillingness to carry the investigation further. Sorio, too, seemed ready enough to let her enquiry remain unanswered. He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say “how can I tell?” and suggested that they should rest for a moment on a littered pile of wood which lay close to the water’s edge.