John Powys - Rodmoor

It was a reversion to such “old days” to have a gentleman “Warden of the Fishes.” Besides it was a blow at the Renshaws between whom and the town-council there was an old established feud. For it was not hidden from the gossips of Rodmoor that the relations between Nance and the family at Oakguard were more than a little strained, nor did the shrewder ones among them hesitate to whisper dark and ominous hints as to the nature of this estrangement.

Baltazar Stork received the news of his friend’s approaching marriage with something like mute fury. The morning when Sorio announced it to him was one of concentrated gloom. The sea was high and rough. The wind wailed through the now almost leafless sycamores and made the sign which bore the Admiral’s head creak and groan in its iron frame. It had rained steadily all through the night and though the rain had now ceased there was no sun to dry the little pools of water which lay in all the trodden places in the green or the puddles, choked up with dead leaves, which stared desolately from the edges of the road upon the sombre heaven. Sorio, having made his momentous announcement in a negligent, off-hand way, as though it were a matter of small importance, rushed off to meet Nance at the station and go with her to Mundham.

As it was Saturday the girl had no scruple about leaving her work. In any case she would have been free, with the rest of Miss Pontifex’s employees, in the early afternoon. She was anxious to spend as long a time as was possible making her final purchases preparatory to their taking possession of Ferry Lodge. The mere name of this relic of Rodmoor’s faded glory was indicative of how times had changed. What was once an inland crossing — several miles from the shore — had now become the river’s mouth and where farmers formerly watered their cattle the fishing boats spread their sails to meet the sea.

Nance had made a clean sweep of the furniture of their predecessor, something about the reputation of Mr. Peewit Swinebitter prejudicing her, in perhaps an exaggerated manner, against the buying of any of his things. This fastidiousness on her part did not, however, lessen the material difficulties of the situation, Sorio being of singularly little assistance in the rôle of a house-furnisher.

Meanwhile, with hat pulled low down over his forehead and his cane switching the rain-drenched grass, Baltazar Stork walked up and down in front of his cottage. He walked thus until he was tired and then he came and stood at the edge of the green and looked at his empty house and at the puddles in the road. Into the largest of these puddles he idly poked his stick, stirring the edge of a half-submerged leaf and making it float across the muddy water. Children passed him unheeded, carrying cans and bottles to be filled at the tavern. Little boys came up to him, acquaintances of his, full of gaiety and mischief, but something in his face made them draw back and leave him. Never, in all his relations with his friend, had Baltazar derived more pleasure from being with him than he had done during the recent weeks. That condition of helpless and wistful incompetence which Nance found so trying in Sorio was to Baltazar Stork the cause of the most delicate and exquisite sensations. Never had he loved the man so well — never had he found him so fascinating. And now, just at the moment when he, the initiated adept in the art of friendship, was reaping the reward of his long patience with his friend’s waywardness and really succeeding in making him depend on him exactly in the way he loved best, there came this accursed girl and carried him off!

The hatred which he felt at that moment towards Nance was so extreme that it overpowered and swamped every other emotion. Baltazar Stork was of that peculiarly constituted disposition which is able to hate the more savagely and vindicatively because of the very fact that its normal mood is one of urbane and tolerant indifference. The patient courtesy of a lifetime, the propitiatory arts of a long, had their revenge just then for all they had made him endure. In a certain sense it was well for him that he could hate. It was, indeed in a measure, an instinct of self-preservation that led him to indulge such a feeling. For below his hatred, down in the deeper levels of his soul, there yawned a gulf, the desolating emptiness of which was worse than death. He did not visualize this gulf in the same concrete manner as he had done on a previous occasion, but he was conscious of it none the less. It was as a matter of fact a thing that had been for long years hidden obscurely under the hard, gay surface of his days. He covered it over by one distraction or the other. Its remote presence had given an added intensity to his zest for the various little pleasures, aesthetic or otherwise, which it was his habit to enjoy. It had done more. It had reduced to comparative insignificance the morbid vexations and imaginative reactions from which his friend suffered. He could afford to appear hard and crystal-cold, capable of facing with equanimity every kind of ultimate horror. And he was capable of facing such. Under the shadow of a thing like that — a thing beyond the worst of insane obsessions, for his mind was cruelly clear as he turned his eyes inward — he was able to look contemptuously into the Gorgon face of any kind of terror. When he chose he could always see the thing as it was, see it as the desolation of emptiness, as a deep, frozen space, void of sound or movement or life or hope or end. There was not the least tinge of insanity in the vision.

What he was permitted to see, by reason of some malign clarity of intellect denied to the majority of his fellows, was simply the real truth of life, its frozen chemistry and deadly purposelessness. Most men visualize existence through a blurring cloud of personal passion, either erotic or imaginative. They suffer, but they suffer from illusion. What separated Baltazar from the majority was his power of seeing things in absolute colourlessness — unconfused by any sort of distorting mirage. Thus what he saw with his soul was the ghastly loneliness of his soul. He saw this frozen, empty, hollow space and he saw it as the natural country in which his soul dwelt, its unutterable reality, its appalling truth. That was why no thought of suicide ever came to him. The thing was too deep. He might kill himself, but in so doing he would only destroy the few superficial distractions that afforded him a temporary freedom. For suicide would only fling him — that at least is what, with horrible clarity, he had come to feel about it — into the depths of his soul, into the very abyss, that is to say, which he escaped by living on the surface. It was a kind of death-in-life that he was conscious of, below his crystalline amenities, but one does not fly to death to escape from death.

It will be seen from this how laughable to him were all Sorio’s neurotic reactions from people and things. People and things were precisely what Baltazar clung to, to avoid that “frozen sea” lying there at the back of everything. It will be easily imagined too, how absurd to him — how fantastic and unreal — were the various hints and glimpses which Sorio had permitted him into what his friend called his “philosophy of destruction.” To make a “philosophy” out of a struggle to reach the ultimate horror of that “frozen sea,” how lamentably pathetic it was, and how childish! No sane person would contemplate such a thing and the attempt proved that Sorio was not sane. As for the Italian’s vague and prophetic suggestions with regard to the possibility of something — philosophers always spoke of “something” when they approached nothing! — beyond “what we call life” that seemed to Baltazar’s mind mere poetic balderdash and moonstruck mysticism. But he had always listened patiently to Sorio’s incoherences. The man would not have been himself without his mad philosophy! It was part of that charming weakness in him that appealed to Baltazar so. It was absurd, of course — this whole business of writing philosophic books — but he was ready to pardon it, ready to listen all night and day to his friend’s dithyrambic diatribes, as long as they brought that particular look of exultation which he found so touching into his classic face!