John Powys - Rodmoor

This change in Sorio was not at all to Nance’s disadvantage in the external aspect of the relations between them; indeed, she was carried forward by it to the point of coming to anticipate with trembling excitement what had begun to seem an almost impossible happiness. For Sorio definitely and in an outburst of impatient pleading, implored her to marry him. In the deeper, more spiritual association between them, however, the change which took place in him now was less satisfactory. Nance could not help feeling that there was something blind, childish, selfish, unchivalrous, — something even reckless and sinister — about this proposal and the passionate eagerness with which he pressed it upon her, considering that he made no more attempt than before to secure any employment and seemed to take it for granted that either she or Baltazar Stork or his own son in America, or some vague providential windfall would provide the money for this startling adventure. Side by side with her surprise at his careless disregard for all practical considerations, Nance could not help feeling a profound apprehension which she herself was unwilling to bring to the surface of her mind with regard to his mood and manner during these days. He seemed to throw himself passively and helplessly upon her hands. He clung to her as a sick child might cling to its parent. His old savage outbursts of cynical humour seemed to have vanished and in their place was a constant querulousness and peevishness which rendered their hours together much less peaceful and happy than they ought to have been. All sorts of little things irritated him — irritated him even in her. He clung to her, she could not help fancying, more out of a strange instinct of self-preservation than out of natural love. She couldn’t help wondering sometimes how it would be when they were actually married. He seemed to find it at once difficult to endure her society and impossible to do without it. The bitter saying of the old Latin poet might have been his motto at that time. “ Nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum. ”

And yet, in spite of all this, these early October days were days of exquisite happiness for Nance. The long probation through which her love had passed had purged and winnowed it. The maternal instinct in her, always the dominant note in her emotions, was satisfied now as it had never been satisfied before, as perhaps unless she had children of her own it would never be satisfied again.

In these days of new hope and new life her youth seemed to revive and put forth exquisite blossoms of gaiety and tenderness. In a physical sense she actually did revive, though this may have been partly due to the cool crisp air that now blew constantly across the fens, and Linda, watching the change with affectionate sympathy, declared she was growing twice as beautiful.

She offered no objection when Sorio insisted upon having their “bans” read out in church, a duty that was most willingly performed without further delay by Hamish Traherne. She did not even protest when he announced that they would be married before October was over, announced it without any indication of how or where they would live, upon whose money or under whose roof!

She felt a natural reluctance to press these practical details upon his notice. The bond that united them was too delicate, too tenuous and precarious, for her to dare to lean heavily upon it, nor did the few hesitating and tentative hints she threw out meet with any response from him. He waved them aside. He threw them from him with a jest or a childish groan of disgust or a vague “Oh, that will work itself out. That will be all right. Don’t worry about that! I’m writing to Baptiste.”

But, as we have said, in spite of all these difficulties and in spite of the deep-hidden dismay which his nervous, querulous mood excited in her, Nance was full of a thrilling and inexpressible happiness during these Autumn days. She loved the roar of the great wind — the northwest wind — in chimneys and house-tops at night. She loved the drifting of the dead leaves along the muddy roads. She loved the long swishing murmur of the rushes growing by the dyke paths as they bent their feathery heads over the wet banks or bowed in melancholy rhythm across the rain-filled ditches.

Autumn was assuredly and without doubt the climacteric season of the Rodmoor fens. They reluctantly yielded to the Spring; they endured the Summer, and the Winter froze them into dead and stoical inertness. But something in the Autumn called out the essential and native qualities of the place’s soul. The fens rose to meet the Autumn in happy and stormy nuptials. The brown, full-brimmed streams mounted up joyously to the highest level of their muddy banks. The faded mallow-plants by the river’s side and the tarnished St. John’s wort in the drenched hedges assumed a pathetic and noble beauty — a beauty full of vague, far-drawn associations for sensitive humanity. The sea-gulls and marsh-birds, the fish, the eels, the water-rats of the replenished streams seemed to share in the general expansion of life with the black and white hornless cattle, the cattle of the fens, who now began to yield their richest milk. Long, chilly, rainy days ended in magnificent and sumptuous sunsets — sunsets in which the whole sky from zenith to nadir became one immense rose of celestial fire. Out of a hundred Rodmoor chimneys rose the smell of burning peat, that smell of all others characteristic of the country whose very soil was formed of the vegetation of forgotten centuries.

In the large dark barns the yellow grain lay piled roof-high, while in every little shed and outhouse in the country, damsons, pears and potatoes lay spread out as if for the enjoyment of some Dionysian gathering of the propitiated earth-gods.

The fishermen, above all, shared in the season’s fortune, going out early and late to their buoy-marked spots on the horizon, where the presence of certain year-old wrecks lying on the sand at the bottom drew the migratory fish and held them for weeks as if by a marine spell.

But if the days had their especial quality, the nights during that October were more significant still. The sky seemed to draw back, back and away, to some purer, clearer, more ethereal level while with a radiance tender and solemn the greater and lesser stars shed down their magical influence. The planets, especially Venus and Jupiter, grew so luminous and large that they seemed to rival the moon; while the Moon, herself, the mystic red moon of the finished harvest, the moon of the equinox, drew the tides after her, higher and fuller and with a deeper note in their ebb and flow than at any other season of the year.

Everywhere swallows were gathering for their long flight, everywhere the wild geese and the herons were rising to incredible heights in the sky and moving northward and westward; and all this while Nance was able, at last really able, to give herself up to her passion for the man she loved.

It was a passion winnowed by waiting and suffering, purged to a pure flame by all she had gone through, but it was a passion none the less — a long exclusive passion — the love of a lifetime. It made her sometimes, this great love of hers, dizzy and faint with fear lest something even now should at the last moment come between them. Sometimes it made her strangely shy of him too, shy and withdrawn as if it were not easy, though so triumphantly sweet, to give herself up body and soul into hands that after all were the hands of a stranger!

Sorio did not understand all this. Sometimes when she thrust him away as if the emotion produced by his caresses were more than she could bear or as if some incalculable pride in her, some inalienable chastity beyond the power of her senses, relucted to yield further, he grew angry and morose and accused her of jealousy or of coldness. This would have been harder to endure from him if there had not existed all the while at the bottom of her heart a strange, maternal pity, a pity not untouched with a sort of humorous irony — the eternal irony of the woman as she submits to the eternal misunderstanding of the man, embracing her without knowing what he does. He seemed to her sometimes in the mere physical stress of his love-making almost like an amorous and vicious boy. She could not resist the consciousness that her knowledge of the mystery of sex — its depth and subtlety not less than its flame and intensity — was something that went much further and was much more complicated and involved with her whole being than anything he experienced. Especially did she smile in her heart at the queer way he had of taking it for granted that he was “seducing” her, of deriving, it seemed, sometimes a satyrish pleasure from that idea, and sometimes a fit of violent remorse. When he was in either of these moods she felt towards him precisely as a mother might feel towards a son whose egoism and ignorance gave him a disproportioned view of the whole world. And yet, in actual age, Sorio was some twenty years her senior.