John Powys - Rodmoor

The question was decided for her. As she emerged on the green she suddenly came upon Sorio himself, standing side by side with Philippa. They both turned quickly as, in the flare of a wind-blown lamp, they perceived her approach. They turned and awaited her without a word.

Without a word, too — and in that slow dreamlike manner which human beings assume at certain crises in their lives, when fate like a palpable presence among them takes their movements into its own hand — they moved off, all three together, in the direction of the park gates. Not a word did any of them utter, till, having passed the gates, they were quite far advanced along that dark and lonely avenue.

Then Philippa broke the silence. “I can say to her, Adrian, what I’ve just said to you — mayn’t I?”

In the thick darkness, full of the heavy smell of rain-soaked leaves, Sorio walked between them. Nance’s hand was already resting upon his arm, and now, as she spoke, Philippa’s fingers searched for his, and took them in her own and held them feverishly.

“You can say what you please, Phil,” he muttered, “but you’ll see what she answers — just what I told you just now.”

Their tone of intimate association stabbed like a knife at the heart of Nance. A moment ago — in fact, ever since she had left her by the weir — she had been feeling less antagonistic and more pitiful towards her vanquished rival. But this pronoun “she” applied mutually by them to herself, seemed to push her back — back and away — outside the circle of some mysterious understanding between the two. Her heart hardened fiercely. Was this girl still possessed of some unknown menacing power?

“What I asked Adrian,” said Philippa quietly, while the pressure of her burning fingers within the man’s hand indicated the strain of this quietness, “was whether you would be generous and noble enough to give him up to me for his last free day — the last day before you’re married. Would you be large-hearted enough for that?”

“What do you mean—‘give him up’ to you?” murmured Nance.

Philippa burst in a shrill unearthly laugh. “Oh, you needn’t be frightened!” she exclaimed. “You needn’t be jealous. I only mean let me go with him, for the whole day, a long walk — you know — or something like that — perhaps a row up the river. It doesn’t matter what, as long as I feel that that day is my day, my day with him —the last, and the longest!”

She was silent, feverish, her fingers twining and twisting themselves round her companion’s, and her breath coming in quick gasps. Nance was silent also, and they all three moved forward through the heavy fragrant darkness.

“You two seem to have settled it between yourselves definitely enough,” Nance remarked at last. “I don’t really see why you need bring me into it at all. Adrian is, of course, entirely free to do what he likes. I don’t see what I have to do with it!”

Philippa’s hot fingers closed tightly upon Sorio’s as she received this rebuff. “You see!” she murmured in a tone that bit into Nance’s flesh like the tooth of an adder. “You see, Adriano!” She shrugged her shoulders and gave a low vindictive laugh. “She’s a thorough woman,” she added with stinging emphasis. “She’s what my mother would call a sweet, tender, sensitive girl. But we mustn’t expect too much from her, Adrian, must we? I mean in the way of generosity.”

Nance withdrew her hand from the arm of her betrothed and they all three walked on in silence.

“You see what you’re in for, my friend,” Philippa began again. “Once married it’ll be always like this. That is what you seem unable to realize. It’s a mistake, as I’ve often said, this mixing of classes.”

Nance could no longer restrain herself. “May I ask what you mean by that last remark?” she whispered in a low voice.

Philippa laughed lightly. “It doesn’t need much explanation,” she replied. “Adrian is, of course, of very ancient blood, and you — well, you betray yourself naturally by this lack of nobility, this common middle-class jealousy!”

Nance turned fiercely upon them, and clutching Sorio’s arm spoke loudly and passionately. “And you —what are you , who, like a girl of the streets, are ready to pick up what you can of a man’s attentions and attract him with mere morbid physical attraction? You —what are you , who, as you say yourself, are ready to share a man with some one else? Do you call that a sign of good-breeding?”

Philippa laughed again. “It’s a sign at any rate of being free from that stupid, stuffy, bourgeois respectability, which Adrian is going to get a taste of now! That very sneer of yours—’ a girl of the streets’—shows the class to which you belong, Nance Herrick! We don’t say those things. It’s what one hears among tradespeople.”

Nance’s fingers almost hurt Sorio’s arms as she tightened her hold upon him. “It’s better than being what you are, Philippa Renshaw,” she burst out. “It’s better than deliberately helping your brother to ruin innocent young girls — yes, and taking pleasure in seeing him ruining them — and then taunting them cruelly in their shame, and holding him back from doing them justice! It’s better than that, Philippa Renshaw, though it may be what most simple-minded decent-hearted women feel. It’s better than being reduced by blind passion to have to come to another woman and beg her on your knees for a ‘last day’ as you call it! It’s better than that —though it may be what ordinary unintellectual people feel!”

Philippa’s fingers grew suddenly numb and stiff in Sorio’s grasp. “Do you know,” she murmured, “you ‘decent-feeling’ woman — if that’s what you call yourself — that a couple of hours ago, when you left me on the river bank, I was within an ace of drowning myself? I suppose ‘decent-feeling’ women never run such a risk! They leave that to ‘street-girls ‘and — and — and to us others!”

Nance turned to Sorio. “So she’s been telling you that she was thinking of drowning herself? I thought it was something of that kind! And I suppose you believed her. I suppose you always believe her!”

“And he always believes you! ” Philippa cried. “Yes, he’s always deceived — the easy fool — by your womanly sensitive ways and your touching refinement! It’s women like you, without intelligence and without imagination, who are the ruin of men of genius. A lot you care for his work! A lot you understand of his thoughts! Oh, yes, you may get him, and cuddle him, and spoil him, but, when it comes to the point, what you are to him is a mere domestic drudge! And not only a drudge, you’re a drag, a burden, a dead-weight! A mere mass of ‘decent-feeling’ womanliness — weighing him down. He’ll never be able to write another line when once you’ve really got hold of him!”

Nance had her answer to this. “I’d sooner he never did write another line,” she cried, “and remain in his sober senses, than be left to your influence, and be driven mad by you — you and your diseased, morbid, wicked imagination!”

Their two voices, rising and falling in a lamentable litany of elemental antagonism — antagonism cruel as life and deeper than death — floated about Sorio’s head, in that perfumed darkness, like opposing streams of poison. It was only that he himself, harassed by long irritating debates with Baltazar, was too troubled, too obsessed by a thousand agitating doubts, to have the energy or the spirit to bring the thing to an end, or he could not have endured it up to this point. With his nerves shaken by Baltazar’s corrosive arts, and the weight of those rain-heavy trees and thick darkness all around him, he felt as if he were in some kind of trance, and were withheld by a paralysing interdict from lifting a finger. There came to him a sort of half-savage, half-humorous remembrance of a conversation he had once had with some one or other — his mind was too confused to recall the occasion — in which he had upheld the idealistic theory of the arrival of a day when sex jealousy would disappear from the earth.