John Powys - Rodmoor

The girl put her hand on the dilapidated balustrade and shook it. The whole ladder trembled from top to bottom and a cloud of ancient flour-dust, grey and mouldy, descended on their heads.

“You see, Adrian?” she remarked. “It really isn’t safe!”

“I don’t care,” he said stubbornly. “What’s it matter? It’s dull and stuffy down here. I’m going to try anyway.”

He began cautiously ascending what remained intact of the forlorn ladder. The thing creaked ominously under his weight. He managed, however, to get sufficiently high to secure a hold upon the threshold-beam of the floor above when, with the aid of a projecting plank from the side-wall of the building, he managed to retain his position and after a brief struggle, disappeared from his companion’s view.

His voice came down to her from above, muffled a little by the intervening wood-work.

“It’s lovely up here, Phil! There are two little windows and you can see all over the fens. Wait a minute, we’ll soon have you up.”

There was a pause and she heard him moving about over her head.

“You’d much better come down,” she shouted. “I’m not going up there. There’s no possible way.”

He made no answer to this and there was dead silence for several minutes. She went to the entrance and emerged into the open air. The wide horizon around her seemed void and empty. Upon the surface of the immense plain only a few visible objects broke the brooding monotony. To the south and east she could discern just one or two familiar landmarks but to the west there was nothing — nothing but an eternal level of desolation losing itself in the sky. She gave an involuntary shudder and moved away from the windmill to the edge of a reed-bordered ditch. There was a pool of gloomy water in the middle of the reeds and across this pool and round and round it whirled, at an incredible speed, a score or so of tiny water-beetles, never leaving the surface and never pausing for a moment in their mad dance. A wretched little moth, its wings rendered useless by contact with the water, struggled feebly in the centre of this pool, but the shiny-coated beetles whirled on round it in their dizzy circles as if it had no more significance than the shadow of a leaf. Philippa smiled and walked back to the building.

“Adrian,” she called out, entering its dusty gloom and looking up at the square hole in the ceiling, from which still hung a remnant of broken wood-work.

“Well? What is it?” her friend’s voice answered. “It’s all right; we’ll soon have you up here!”

“I don’t want to go up there,” she shouted back. “I want you to come down. Please come down, Adrian! You’re spoiling all our afternoon.”

Once more there was dead silence. Then she called out again.

“Adrian,” she said, “there’s a moth being drowned in the ditch out here.”

“What? Where? What do you say?” came the man’s reply, accompanied by several violent movements. Presently a rope descended from the hole and swung suspended in the air.

“Look out, my dear,” Sorio’s voice ejaculated and a moment later he came swinging down, hand over hand, and landed at her side. “What’s that?” he gasped breathlessly, “what did you say? A moth in the water? Show me, show me!”

“Oh, it’s nothing, Adrian,” she answered petulantly. “I only wanted you to come down.”

But he had rushed out of the door and down to the stream’s edge.

“I see it! I see it!” he called back at her. “Here, give me my stick!” He came rushing back, pushed roughly past her, seized his stick from the ground and returned to the ditch. It was easy enough to effect the moth’s rescue. The same fluffy stickiness in the thing’s wet wings that made it helpless in the water, made it adhere to the stick’s point. He wiped it off upon the grass and pulled Philippa back into the building.

“I’m glad I came down,” he remarked. “I know it’ll hold now. You won’t mind my tying it round you, will you? I’ll have both the ends down here presently. It’s round a strong hook. It’s all right. And then I’ll pull you up.”

Philippa looked at him with angry dismay. All this agitating fuss over so childish an adventure irritated her beyond endurance. His proposal had, as a matter of fact, a most subtle and curious effect upon her. It changed the relations between them. It reduced her to the position of a girl playing with an elder brother. It outraged, with an element of the comic, her sense of dramatic fastidiousness. It humiliated her pride and broke the twisted threads of all kinds of delicate spiritual nets she had in her mind to cast over him. It placed her by his side as a weak and timid woman by the side of a willful and strong-limbed man. Her ascendency over him, as she well knew, depended upon the retaining, on her part, of a certain psychic evasiveness — a certain mysterious and tantalizing reserve. It depended — at any rate that is what she imagined — upon the inscrutable look she could throw into her eyes and upon the tragic glamour of her ambiguous red lips and white cheeks. How could she possibly retain all these characteristics when swinging to and fro at the end of a rope?

Sorio’s suggestion outraged something in her that went down to the very root of her personality. Walking with him, swimming with him, rowing in a boat with him — all those things were harmonious to her mind and congruous with her personal charm. None of these things interfered with the play of her intelligence, with the poise, the reserve, the aloofness of her spiritual challenge. She was exceptionally devoid of fear in these boyish sports and could feel herself when she engaged in them with him, free of the limitations of her sex. She could retain completely, as she indulged herself in them, all the equilibrium of her being — the rhythm of her identity. But this proposal of Sorio’s not only introduced a discordant element that had a shrewd vein of the ludicrous in it, it threw her into a physical panic. It pulled and tugged at the inmost fibres of her self-restraint. It made her long to sit down on the ground and cry like a child. She wondered vaguely whether it was that Adrian was revenging himself upon her at that moment for some accumulated series of half-physical outrages that he had himself in his neurotic state been subjected to lately. As to his actual sanity, it never occured to her to question that . She herself was too wayward and whimsical in the reactions of her nerves and the processes of her mind to find anything startling, in that sense, in what he was now suggesting. It was simply that it changed their relations — it destroyed her ascendency, it brought things down to brute force, it turned her into a woman.

Her mind, as she stood hesitating, reviewed the moth incident. That sort of situation — Adrian’s fantastic mania for rescuing things — had just the opposite effect on her. He might poke his stick into half the ditches of Rodmoor and save innumerable drowning moths; the only effect that had on her was to make her feel superior to him, better adapted than he to face the essential facts of life, its inherent and integral cruelty for instance. But now — to see that horrible rope-end dangling from that gaping hole and to see the eager, violent, masculine look in her friend’s eyes — it was unendurable; endurable; it drove her, so to speak, against the jagged edge of the world’s brute wall.

“To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,

Is delicate and rare—”

she found herself quoting, with a horrible sense that the humour of the parody only sharpened the sting of her dilemma.

“I won’t do it,” she said resolutely at last, trying to brave it out with a smile. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Besides, I’m much too heavy. You couldn’t pull me up if you tried till nightfall! No, no, Adriano, don’t be so absurd. Don’t spoil our time together with these mad ideas. Let’s sit down here and talk. Or why not light a fire? That would be exciting enough, wouldn’t it?”