John Powys - Rodmoor

This “look of exultation” in Sorio’s features had indeed been accompanied during the last month by an expression of wistful and bewildered helplessness and it was just the union of these two things that Baltazar found so irresistibly appealing. He was drawn closer to Adrian, in fact, during these Autumn days, than he had ever been drawn to any one. And it was just at this moment, just when he was happiest in their life together, that Nance Herrick must needs obtrude her accursed feminine influence and with this result! So he gave himself up without let or hindrance to his hatred of this girl. His hatred was a cold, calculated, deliberate thing, clear of all volcanic disturbances but, such as it was, it possessed him at that moment to the exclusion of everything else. He imagined to himself now, as with the end of his stick he guided that sycamore leaf across the puddle, how Nance would buy those things in the Mundham shops and what pleasure there would be in her grey eyes, that peculiar pleasure unlike anything else in the world which a woman has when she is indulging, at the same moment, her passion for domestic detail and her passion for her lover!

He saw the serene possessive look in her face, the look of one who at last, after long waiting, arrives within sight of the desired end. He saw the little outbursts of girlish humour — oh, he knew them so well, those outbursts! — and he saw the fits of half-assumed, half-natural shyness that would come over her and the soft, dreamy tenderness in her eyes, as together with Adrian, she bought this thing or the other, full of delicate association, for their new dwelling-place. His imagination went even further. He seemed to hear her voice as she spoke sympathetically, pityingly, of himself. She would be sure to do that! It would come so prettily from her just then and would appeal so much to Adrian! She would whisper to him over their lunch in some little shop — he saw all that too — of how sad she felt to be taking him away from his old friend and leaving that friend alone. And he could see the odd bewildered smile, half-remorseful and half-joyful with which Sorio would note that disinterested sympathy and think to himself what a noble affectionate creature she was and how lucky he was to win her. He saw how careful she would be not to tire him or tease him with her purchases, how she would probably vary the tedium of the day with some pleasant little strolls together round the Abbey grounds or perhaps down by the wharves and the barges.

Yes, she had won her victory. She was gathering up her spoils. She was storing up her possessions! Could any human feeling, he asked himself with a deadly smile upon his lips, be more sickeningly, more achingly, intense than the hatred he felt for this normal, natural, loving woman?

He swept his stick through the muddy water, splashing it vindictively on all sides and then, moving into the middle of the road, looked at his empty cottage. Here, then, he would have to live again alone! Alone with himself, alone with his soul, alone with the truth of life!

No, it was too much. He never would submit to it. Better swallow at once and without more nonsense the little carefully concocted draught which he had long kept under lock and key! After all he would have to come to that, sooner or later. He had long since made up his mind that if things and persons — the “things and persons” he used as his daily drug, failed him or lost their savour he would take the irrevocable step and close the whole farce. Everything was the same. Everything was equal. He would only move one degree nearer the central horror — the great ice field of eternity — the plain without end or beginning, frozen and empty, empty and frozen! He stared at his cottage windows. No, it was unthinkable, beginning life over again without Adrian. A hundred little things plucked at random from the sweet monotony of their days together came drifting through his mind. The peculiar look Adrian had when he first woke in the morning — the savage greediness with which he would devour honey and brown bread — the pleading, broken, childlike tones in his voice when, after some quarrel between them he begged his friend to forgive him — all these things and many others, came pouring in upon him in a great wave of miserable self-pity. No — she should not win. She should not triumph. She should not enjoy the fruits of her victory — the strong feminine animal! He would sooner kill her and then kill himself to avoid the gallows. But killing was a silly futile kind of revenge. Infants in the art of hatred killed their enemies! But at any rate, if he killed her she would never settle down in her nice new house with her dear husband! But then, on the other hand, she would be the winner to the end. She would never feel as he was feeling now; she would never look into his eyes and know that he knew he had beaten her; he would never see her disappointment. No — killing was a stupid, melodramatic, blundering way out of it. Artists ought to have a subtler imagination! Well, something must be done, and done soon. He felt he did not care what suffering he caused Sorio, the more he suffered the better, if only he could see the look in those grey eyes of Nance that confessed she was defeated!

Quite quietly, quite calmly, he gathered together all the forces of his nature to accomplish this one end. His hatred rose to the level of a passion. He vowed that nothing should make him pause, no scruple, no obstacle, until he saw that beaten look in Nance’s face. Like all dominant obsessions, like all great lusts, his purpose associated itself with a clear concrete image, the image of the girl’s expression when at last, face to face with him, she knew herself broken, helpless and at his mercy.

He walked swiftly down the High Street, crossed the open space by the harbour and made his way to the edge of the waves. Surely that malignant tide would put some triumphant idea into his brain. The sea — the sterile, unharvested sea — had from the beginning of the world, been the enemy of woman! Warden of the Fishes! He laughed as he thought of Sorio’s assuming such a title.

“Not yet, my friend — not quite yet!” he murmured, gazing across the stormy expanse of water. Warden of the Fishes! With a strong, sweet, affectionate wife to look after him? “No, no, Adriano!” he cried hoarsely, “we haven’t come to that yet — we haven’t come to that quite yet!”

By some complicated, psychological process he seemed to be aware, as he stared at the foaming sea-horses, of the head of his mute friend Flambard floating, amid the mist of his own woman-like hair, in the green hollows of the surf. He found himself vaguely wondering what he — the super-subtle Venetian — would have done had he been “fooled to the top of his bent” by a girl like Nance — had he been betrayed in his soul’s deepest passion. And all at once it came over him, not distinctly and vividly but obscurely and remotely as if through a cloudy vapour from a long way off, from far down the vistas of time itself, what Flambard would have done.

He stooped and picked up a long leather-like thong of wet, slippery seaweed and caressed it with his hands. At that moment there passed through him a most curious sensation — the sensation that he had himself — he and not Flambard — stood just in this way but by a different sea, ages, centuries ago — and had arrived at the same conclusion. The sensation vanished quickly enough and with it the image of Flambard, but the idea of what remained for him to do still hovered like a cloud at the back of his mind. He did not drag it forth from its hiding place. He never definitely accepted it. The thing was so dark and hideous, belonging so entirely to an age when “passional crimes” were more common and more remorseless than at the present, that even Baltazar with all the frozen malice of his hate scrupled to visualize it in the daylight. But he did not drive it away. He permitted it to work upon him and dominate him. It was as though some “other Baltazar” from a past as remote as Flambard’s own and perhaps far remoter — had risen up within him in answer to that cry to the inhuman waters. The actual working of his mind was very complicated and involved at that moment. There were moments of wavering — moments of drawing back into the margin of uncertainty. But these moments grew constantly less and less effective. Beyond everything else that definite image of Nance’s grey eyes, full of infinite misery, confessing her defeat, and even pleading with him for mercy, drove these wavering moments away. It was worth it, any horror was worth it, to satiate his revenge by the sight of what her expression would be as he looked into her face then. And, after all, the thing he projected would in any case, come about sooner or later. It was on its way. The destinies called for it. The nature of life demanded it. The elements conspired to bring it about. The man’s own fatality was already with a kind of vehemence, rushing headlong — under the fall of these Autumn rains and the drifting of these Autumn leaves — to meet it and embrace it! All he would have to do himself would be just to give the wheel of fate the least little push, the least vibration of an impulse forward, with his lightest finger!