John Powys - Rodmoor

They stepped down the bank where they were, out of sight of the building above, and seated themselves. With their arms around their knees they contemplated the flowing tide and the dull-coloured mud of the opposite bank. A coil of decaying rope, tossed aside from some passing barge, lay at Sorio’s feet and, as he sat in gloomy silence, he thought how like the thing was to something he had once seen at an inquest in a house in New York. As for Nance, she found it difficult to remove her eyes from a shapeless bundle of sacking which the tide was carrying. Sometimes it would get completely submerged and then again it would reappear.

“Why is it,” she thought, “that there is always something horrible about tidal rivers? Is it because of the way they have of carrying things backward and forward, backward and forward, without ever allowing them either to get far inland or clear out to sea? Is a tidal river,” she said to herself, “the one thing in all the world in which nothing can be lost or hidden or forgotten?”

It was curious how difficult they both felt it just then either to move from where they were or to address a single word to one another. They seemed hypnotized by something — hypnotized by some thought which remained unspoken at the back of their minds. They felt an extreme reluctance to envisage again that large square building surrounded by weather-stained wall, a wall from which the ivy had been carefully scraped.

Slowly, little by little, the bank of clouds mounted up to the meridian, casting over everything as it did so a more and more ominous twilight. The silence between them became after a while, a thing with a palpable presence. It seemed to float upon the water to their feet and, rising about them like a wraith, like a mist, like the ghost of a dead child, it fumbled with clammy fingers upon their hearts.

“I’m sure,” Sorio cried at last, with an obvious struggle to break the mysterious sorcery which weighed on them, “I’m perfectly sure that Ravelston Grange must be round that second bend of the river — do you see? — where those trees are! I’m sure it must! At any rate we must come to it at last if we only go on.”

He looked at his watch.

“Heavens! We’ve taken an hour already getting here! It’s nearly six. How on earth have we been so long?”

“Do you know, Adrian,” Nance remarked — and she couldn’t help noticing as she did so that though he spoke so resolutely of going forward he made not the least movement to leave his seat—“do you know I feel as if we were in a dream. I have the oddest feeling that any moment we might wake up and find ourselves back in Rodmoor. Adrian, dear, let’s go back! Let’s go back to the town. There’s something that depresses me beyond words about all this.”

“Nonsense!” cried Sorio in a loud and angry voice, leaping to his feet and snatching up his stick. “Come on, my girl, come, child! We’ll see that Ravelston place before the rain gets to us!”

They clambered up the bank and walked swiftly forward. Nance noticed that Sorio looked steadily at the river, looked at the river without intermission and with hardly a word, till they were well beyond the very last houses of Mundham. It was an unspeakable relief to her when, at last, crossing a little footbridge over a weir, they found themselves surrounded by the open fens.

“Behind those trees, Nance,” Sorio kept repeating, “behind those trees! I’m absolutely sure I’m right and that Ravelston Grange is there. By the way, girl, which of your poets wrote the verses—

‘She makes her immemorial moan,

She keeps her shadowy kine,

O, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line!’

They’ve been running in my head all the afternoon ever since I saw ‘Keith Radipole,’ on those beer-barrels.”

Nance, however, was too eager to reach the real Ravelston to pay much heed to his poetic allusion.

“Oh, it sounds like — oh, I don’t know — Tennyson, perhaps!” and she pulled him forward towards the trees.

These proved to be a group of tall French poplars which, just then, were muttering volubly in the rainsmelling wind. They hurried past them and paused before a gate in a very high wall.

“What’s this?” exclaimed Sorio. “ This can’t be Ravelston. It looks more like a prison.”

For a moment his eyes encountered Nance’s and the girl glanced quickly away from what she read in his face. She called out to an old man who was hoeing potatoes behind some iron railings where the wall ended.

“Could you tell me where Ravelston Grange is?” she enquired.

The old man removed his hat and regarded her with a whimsical smile.

“’Tis across the river, lady, and there isn’t no bridge for some many miles. Maybe with any luck ye may meet a cattle-boat to take ye over but there’s little surety about them things.”

“What’s this place, then?” asked Sorio abruptly, approaching the iron railings.

“This, mister? Why this be the doctor’s house of the County Asylum. This be where they keep the superior cases, as you might say, them what pays summat, ye understand, and be only what you might call half daft. You must a’ seed the County Asylum as you came along.’ Tis a wonderful large place, one of the grandest, so they say, on this side of the kingdom.”

“Thank you,” said Sorio curtly. “That’s just what we wanted to know. Yes, we saw the house you speak of. It certainly looks big enough. Have there been many new cases lately? Is this what you might call a good year for mental collapses?” As he spoke he peered curiously between the iron bars as if anxious to get some sight of the “half daft,” who could afford to pay for their keep.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘a good year,’ mister,” answered the man, watching him with little twinkling eyes, “but I reckon folk have been as liable to go shaky this year as most other years. ’Tisn’t in the season, I take it, ’tis in the man or for the matter of that,” and he cast an apologetic leer in Nance’s direction, “in the woman.”

“Come on, Adrian,” interposed his companion, “you see that guide-book told us all wrong. We’d better get back to the station.”

But Sorio held tightly to the railings with both his hands.

“Don’t tease me, Nance,” he said irritably. “I want to talk to this excellent man.”

“You’d better do what your missus says, mister,” observed the gardener, returning to his work. “The authorities don’t like no loitering in these places.”

But Sorio disregarded the hint.

“I should think,” he remarked, “it wouldn’t be so very difficult to escape out of here.” He received no reply to this and Nance pulled him by the sleeve.

“Please, Adrian, please come away,” she pleaded, with tears in her voice. The old man lifted up his head.

“You go back where you be come from,” he observed, “and thank the good Lord you’ve got such a pretty lady to look after you. There be many what envies you and many what ’ud like to stand in your shoes, and that’s God’s truth.”

Sorio sighed heavily, and letting go his hold upon the railings, turned to his companion.

“Let’s find another way to the town,” he said. “There must be some road over there, or at worst, we can walk along the line.”

They moved off hastily in the direction opposite from the river and the old man, after making an enigmatic gesture behind their backs, spat upon his hands and returned to his work. The sky was now entirely overclouded but still no rain fell.

WITH the coming of September there was a noticeable change in the weather. The air got perceptibly colder, the sea rougher and there were dark days when the sun was hardly seen at all. Sometimes the prevailing west wind brought showers, but so far, in spite of the cooler atmosphere, there was little heavy rain. The rain seemed to be gathering and massing on every horizon, but though its presence was felt, its actual coming was delayed and the fields and gardens remained scorched and dry. The ditches in the fens were low that season — lower than they had been for many years. Some of them were actually empty and in others there was so little water that the children could catch eels and minnows with their naked hands. In many portions of the salt marshes it was possible to walk dry-shod where, in the early Spring, one would have sunk up to the warst, or even up to the neck.