Part 14
“It’s absurd to have any secrets between you and me,” Sorio was saying, his face reflecting the light of the sunset as it poured down the river’s surface to where they sat. “When I become quite impossible to you as a companion, I suppose you’ll tell me so and turn me out. But until then I’m going to assume that I interest you and don’t bore you.”
“It isn’t a question of boring any one,” replied the other. “You annoyed me just now because I thought you were making no effort to control yourself. You seemed trying to rake up every repulsive sensation you’ve ever had and thrust it down my throat. Bored? Certainly I wasn’t bored! On the contrary, I was much more what you might call _bitten_. You go so far, my dear, you go so far!”
“I don’t call that going far at all,” said Sorio sulkily. “What’s the use of living together if we can’t talk of everything? Besides, you didn’t let me finish. What I wanted to say was that for some reason or other, I’ve lately got to a point when every one I meet--every mortal person, and especially every stranger--strikes me as odious and disgusting. I’ve had the feeling before but never quite like this. It’s not a pleasant feeling, my dear, I can assure you of that!”
“But what do you mean--what do you mean by odious and disgusting?” threw in the other. “I suppose they’re made in the same way we are. Flesh and blood is flesh and blood, after all.”
As Baltazar said this, what he thought in his mind was much as follows: “Adriano is evidently going mad again. This kind of thing is one of the symptoms. I like having him here with me. I like looking at his face when he’s excited. He has a beautiful face--it’s more purely antique in its moulding than half the ancient cameos. I especially like looking at him when he’s harassed and outraged. He has a dilapidated wistfulness at those times which exactly suits my taste. I should miss Adriano frightfully if he went away. No one I’ve ever lived with suits me better. I can annoy him when I like and I can appease him when I like. He fills me with a delicious sense of power. If only Philippa would leave him alone, and that Herrick girl would stop persecuting him, he’d suit me perfectly. I like him when his nerves are quivering and twitching. I like the ‘wounded-animal look’ he has then. But it’s these accursed girls who spoil it all. Of course it’s their work, this new mania. They carry everything so far! I like him to get wild and desperate but I don’t want him mad. These girls stick at nothing. They’d drive him into an asylum if they could, poor helpless devil!”
While these thoughts slid gently through Stork’s head, his friend was already answering his question about “flesh and blood.” “It’s just that which gets on my nerves,” he said. “I can stand it when I’m talking to you because I forget everything except your mind, and I can stand it when I’m making love to a girl, because I forget everything but--”
“Don’t say her body!” threw in Baltazar.
“I wasn’t going to,” snarled the other. “I know it isn’t their bodies one thinks of. It’s--it’s--what the devil is it? It’s something much deeper than that. Well, never mind! What I want to say is this. With you and Raughty, and a few others who really interest me, I forget the whole thing. _You_ are individuals to me. I’m interested in you, and I forget what you’re like, or that you have flesh at all.
“It’s when I come upon people I’m neither in love with nor interested in, that I have this sensation, and of course,” and he surveyed a group of women who at that moment were raising angry voices from an archway on the further side of the harbour, “and of course I have it every day.”
Stork looked at him with absorbed attention, holding between his fingers an unlit cigarette. “What exactly _is_ the feeling you have?” he enquired gently.
The light on Sorio’s face had faded with the fading of the glow on the water. There began to fall upon the place where they sat, upon the cobble-stones of the little quay, upon the wharf steps, slimy with green seaweed, upon the harbour mud and the tarred gunwales of the gently rocking barges, upon the pallid tide flowing inland with gurglings and suckings and lappings and long-drawn sighs, that indescribable sense of the coming on of night at a river’s mouth, which is like nothing else in the world. It is, as it were, the meeting of two infinite vistas of imaginative suggestion--the sense of the mystery of the boundless horizons sea-ward, and the more human mystery of the unknown distance inland, its vague fields and marshes and woods and silent gardens--blending there together in a suspended breath of ineffable possibility, sad and tender, and touching the margin of what cannot be uttered.
“What is it?” repeated Sorio dreamily, and in a low melancholy voice. “How can I tell you what it is? It’s a knowledge of the inner truth, I suppose. It’s the fact that I’ve come to know, at last, what human beings are really like. I’ve come to see them stripped and naked--no! worse than that--I’ve come to see them _flayed_. I’ve got to the point, Tassar, my friend, when I see the world _as it is_, and I can tell you it’s not a pleasant sight!”
Baltazar Stork regarded him with a look of the most exquisite pity, a pity which was not the less genuine because the emotion that accompanied it was one of indescribable pleasure. In the presence of his friend’s massive face and powerful figure he felt deliciously delicate and frail, but with this sense of fragility came a feeling of indescribable power--the power of a mind that is capable of contemplating with equanimity a view of things at which another staggers and shivers and grows insane. It was allotted to Baltazar by the secret forces of the universe to know during that hour, one of the most thrilling moments of his life.
“To get to the point I’ve reached,” continued Sorio gently, watching the colour die out from the water’s surface and a whitish glimmer, silvery and phantom-like, take its place, “means to sharpen one’s senses to a point of terrible receptivity. In fact, until you can hear the hearts of people beating--until you can hear their contemptible lusts hissing and writhing in their veins, like evil snakes--you haven’t reached the point. You haven’t reached it until you can smell the graveyard--yes! The graveyard of all mortality--in the cleanest flesh you approach. You haven’t reached it till every movement people make, every word they speak, betrays them for what they are, betrays the vulture on the wing, and the hyena on the prowl. You haven’t reached it till you feel ready to cry out, like a child in a nightmare, and beat the air with your hands, so suffocating is the pressure of loathsome living bodies--bodies marked and sealed and printed with the signs of death and decomposition!”
Baltazar Stork struck a match and lit his cigarette.
“Well?” he remarked, stretching out his legs and leaning back on the wooden bench. “Well? The world is like that, then. You’ve found it out. You know it. You’ve made the wonderful discovery. Why can’t you smoke cigarettes, then, and make love to your lovely friends, and let the whole thing go? You’ll be dead yourself in a year or two in any case.
“Adriano dear,” he lowered his voice to an impressive whisper, “shall I tell you something? You are making all this fuss and driving yourself desperate about a thing which doesn’t really concern you in the least. It’s not your business if the world does reek like a carcass. It’s not your business if people’s brains are full of poisonous snakes and their bellies of greedy lecheries. It’s not your business--do you understand--if human flesh smells of the graveyard. Your affair, my boy, is to get what amusement you can out of it and make yourself as comfortable as you can in it. It might be worse, it might be better. It doesn’t really make much difference either way.
“Listen to me, Adriano! I say to you now, as we sit at this moment watching this water, unless you get rid of this new mania of yours, you’ll end as you did in America. You’ll simply go mad again, my dear, and that would be uncomfortable for you and extremely inconvenient for me. The world is not _meant_ to be taken seriously. It’s meant to be handled as you’d handle a troublesome girl. Take what amuses you and let the rest go to the devil! Anything else--and I know what I’m talking about--tends to simple misery.
“Heigh ho! But it’s a most delicious evening! What nonsense all this talk of ours is! Look at that boy over there. He’s not worrying himself about grave-yards. Here, Harry! Tommy! Whatever you call yourself--come here! I want to speak to you.”
The child addressed was a ragged barelegged urchin, of about eleven, who had been for some while slowly gravitating around the two men. He came at once, at Baltazar’s call, and looked at them both, wonderingly and quizzically.
“Got any pictures?” he asked. Stork nodded and, opening a new box of cigarettes, handed the boy a little oblong card stamped with the arms of some royal European dynasty. “I likes the Honey-Dew ones best,” remarked the boy, “them as has the sport cards in ’em.”
“We can’t always have sport cards, Tommy,” said Baltazar. “Little boys, as the world moves round, must learn to put up with the arms of European princes. Let me feel your muscle, Tommy. I’ve an idea that you’re suffering from deficient nourishment.” The child extended his arm, and then bent it, with an air of extreme and anxious gravity. “Pretty good,” said Stork, smiling. “Yes, I may say you’re decidedly powerful for your size. What’s your opinion, Tommy, about things in general? This gentleman here thinks we’re all in a pretty miserable way. He thinks life’s a hell of a bad job. What do you think about it?”
The boy looked at him suspiciously. “Ben Porter, what cleans the knives up at the Admiral’s, tried that game on with me. But I let him know, soon enough, who he were talking to.” He moved off hastily after this, but a moment later ran back, pointing excitedly at a couple of sea-gulls which were circling near them.
“A man shot one of them birds last night,” he said, “and it fell into the water. Lordy! But it did splash! ’Tweren’t properly killed, I reckon--just knocked over.”
“What’s that?” said Sorio sharply. “What became of it then? Who picked it up?”
The boy looked at him with a puzzled stare. “_They_ ain’t no good to eat,” he rejoined, “they be what you call cannibal-birds. They feeds on muck. Cats’ll eat ’em, though,” he added.
“What became of it?” shouted Sorio, in a threatening voice.
“Went out with the tide, Mister, most like,” answered the child, moving apprehensively away from him. “I saw some fellows in a boat knock at it with their oars, but they couldn’t get it. It sort o’ flapped and swimmed away.”
Sorio rose from his seat and strode to the edge of the quay. He looked eastward, past the long line of half-submerged wooden stakes which marked the approach to the harbour. “When did that devil shoot it, do you say?” he asked, turning to the boy. But the youngster had taken to his heels. Angry-looking bronze-faced gentlemen who interested themselves in wounded sea-gulls were something new in his experience.
“Let’s get a boat and row out to those stakes,” said Adrian suddenly. “I seem to see something white over there. Look! Don’t you think so?”
Baltazar moved to his side. “Heavens! my dear,” he remarked languidly, “you don’t suppose the thing would be there now, after all this time? However,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “if it’ll put you into a better mood, by all means let’s do it.”
It was, when it came to the point, Baltazar who untied an available boat from its moorings, and Baltazar who appropriated a pair of oars that were leaning against a fish shed. In details of this kind the passionate Sorio was always seized with a paralysis of nervous incompetence. Once in the boat, however, the younger man refused to do anything but steer. “I’m not going to pull against this current, for all the sea-gulls in the world,” he remarked.
Sorio rowed with desperate impetuosity, but it was a slow and laborious task. Several fishermen, loitering on the quay after their supper, surveyed the scene with interest. “The gentleman wants to exercise ’isself afore dinner-time,” observed one. “’Tis a wonder if he moves ’er,” rejoined another, “but ’e’s rowin’ like ’twas a royal regatta.”
With the sweat pouring down his face and the muscles of his whole body taut and quivering, Sorio tugged and strained at the oars. At first it seemed as though the boat hardly moved at all. Then, little by little, it forged ahead, the tide’s pressure diminishing as the mouth of the harbour widened. After several minutes’ exhausting effort, they reached the place where the first of the wooden piles rose out of the water. It was tangled with seaweed and bleached with sun and wind. The tide gurgled and foamed round it. Baltazar yawned.
“They’re all like this one,” he said. “You see what they’re like. Nothing could possibly cling to them, unless it had hands to cling with.”
Sorio, resting on his oars, glared at the darkening waters. “Let’s get to the last of them anyway,” he muttered. He pulled on, the effort becoming easier and easier as they escaped from the in-flow of the river-mouth and reached the open sea. When at last the boat rubbed its side against the last of the stakes, they were nearly a quarter of a mile from land. No, there was certainly no sea-gull here, alive or dead!
A buoy, with a bell attached to it, sent at intervals, over the water, a profoundly melancholy cry--a cry subdued and yet tragic, not absolutely devoid of hope and yet full of heart-breaking wistfulness. The air was hot and windless; the sky heavy with clouds; the horizon concealed by the rapidly falling night. Sorio seized the stake with his hand to keep the boat steady. There were already lights in the town, and some of these twinkled out towards them, in long, radiating, quivering lines.
“Tassar!” whispered Sorio suddenly, in a tone strangely and tenderly modulated.
“Well, my child, what is it?” returned the other.
“I only want to tell you,” Adrian went on, “that whatever I may say or do in the future, I recognize that you’re the best friend I’ve got, except one.” As he said the words “except one,” his voice had a vibrant softness in it.
“Thank you, my dear,” replied his friend calmly. “I should certainly be extremely distressed if you made a fool of yourself in any way. But who is my rival, tell me that! Who is this one who’s a better friend than I? Not Philippa, I hope--or Nance Herrick?”
Sorio sighed heavily. “I vowed to myself,” he muttered, “I would never talk to any one again about him: but the sound of that bell--isn’t it weird, Tassar? Isn’t it ghostly?--makes me long to talk about him.”
“Ah! I understand,” and Baltazar Stork drew in his breath with a low whistle, “I understand! You’re talking about your boy over there. Well, my dear, I don’t blame you if you’re homesick for him. I have a feeling that he’s an extraordinarily beautiful youth. I always picture him to myself like my Venetian. Is he like Flambard, Adrian?”
Sorio sighed again, the sigh of one who sins against his secret soul and misses the reward of his sacrilege. “No--no,” he muttered, “it isn’t that! It isn’t anything to do with his being beautiful. God knows if Baptiste _is_ beautiful! It’s that I want him. It’s that he understands what I’m trying to do in the darkness. It’s simply that I want him, Tassar.”
“What do you mean by that ‘trying in the darkness,’ Adriano? What ‘darkness’ are you talking about?”
Sorio made no immediate answer. His hand, as he clung to the stake amid the rocking of the boat, encountered a piece of seaweed of that kind which possesses slippery, bubble-like excrescences, and he dug his nails into one of these leathery globes, with a vague dreamy idea that if he could burst it he would burst some swollen trouble in his brain.
“Do you remember,” he said at last, “what I showed you the other night, or have you forgotten?”
Baltazar looked at his mistily outlined features and experienced, what was extremely unusual with him, a faint sense of apprehensive remorse. “Of course I remember,” he replied. “You mean those notes of yours--that book you’re writing?”
But Sorio did not hear him. All his attention was concentrated just then upon the attempt to burst another seaweed bubble. The bell from the unseen buoy rang out brokenly over the water; and between the side of their boat and the stake to which the man was clinging there came gurglings and lappings and whispers, as if below them, far down under the humming tide, some sad sea-creature, without hope or memory or rest, were tossing and moaning, turning a drowned inhuman face towards the darkened sky.
XVI
THE FENS
Nance was able, in a sort of lethargic obstinacy, to endure the strain of her feelings for Sorio, now that she had the influence of her familiar work to dull her nerves. She tried hard to make things cheerful for her not less heart-weary sister, devising one little scheme after another to divert and distract the child, and never permitting her own trouble to interfere with her sympathy.
But behind all this her soul ached miserably, and her whole nature thirsted and throbbed for the satisfaction of her love. Her work played its part as a kind of numbing opiate and the evenings spent among Letitia Pontifex’ flower-beds were not devoid of moments of restorative hope, but day and night the pain of her passion hurt her and the tooth of jealousy bit into her flesh.
It was worst of all in the nights. The sisters slept in two small couches in the same room and Nance found herself dreading more and more, as July drew to its close, that hour when they came in from their neighbour’s garden and undressing in silence, lay down so near to one another. They both tried hard, Linda no less than her sister, to put the thoughts that vexed them out of their minds and behave as if they were fancy-free and at peace, but the struggle was a difficult one. If they only hadn’t known, so cruelly well, just what the other was feeling, as they turned alternately from side to side, and like little feverish animals gasped and fretted, it would have been easier to bear. “Aren’t you asleep yet?” one of them would whisper plaintively, and the submissive, “I’m so sorry, dear; but oh! I wish the morning would come,” that she received in answer, met with only too deep a response.
One unusually hot night--it happened to be the first Sunday in August and the eve of the Bank Holiday--Nance felt as though she would scream out aloud if her sister moved in her bed again.
There was something that humiliated and degraded in this mutual misery. It was hard to be patient, hard not to feel that her own aching heart was in some subtle way mocked and insulted by the presence of the same hurt in the heart of another. It reduced the private sorrow of each to a sort of universal sex pain, to suffer from which was a kind of outrage to what was sacred and secret in their individual souls.
There were two windows in their room, one opening on the street and one upon an enclosed yard at the back of the house. Nance, as she now lay, with the bed-clothes tossed aside from her, and her hands clasped behind her head, was horribly conscious not only of the fact that her sister was just as wide awake as she herself, but that they were listening _together_ to the same sounds. These sounds were two-fold, and they came sometimes separately and sometimes simultaneously. They consisted of the wailing of an infant in a room on the other side of the street, and the whining of a dog in a yard adjoining their own.
The girl felt as though every species of desolation known in the world were concentrated in these two sounds. She kept her eyes tightly shut so as not to see the darkness, but this proceeding only intensified the acute receptivity of her other senses. She visualized the infant and she visualized the dog. The one she imagined with a puckered, wrinkled face--a face such as Mr. Traherne might have had in his babyhood--and plague-spots of a loathsome colour; she saw the colour against her burning eyeballs as if she were touching it with her fingers and it was of a reddish brown. The dog had a long smooth body, without hair, and as it whined she saw it feebly scratching itself, but while it scratched, she knew, with evil certainty, that it was unable to reach the place where the itching maddened it.
There was hardly any air in the room, in spite of the open windows, and Nance fancied that she discerned an odour proceeding from the wainscoting that resembled the dust that had once greeted her from a cupboard in one of the unused bedrooms in Dyke House, dust that seemed to be composed of the moth-eaten garments of generations of dead humanity.
She felt that she could have borne these things--the whining dog, and the wailing infant--if only Linda, lying with her face to the wall, were not listening to them also, listening with feverish intentness. Yes, she could have borne it if the whole night were not listening--if the whole night were not listening to the turnings and tossings of humanity, trying to ease the itch of its desire and never able to reach, toss and turn as it might, the place where the plague-spot troubled it.
With a cry she leapt from her bed and, fumbling on the dressing-table, struck a match and lit a candle. The flickering flame showed Linda sitting bolt-upright with lamentable wide-open eyes.
Nance went to the window which looked out on the yard. Here she turned and threw back from her forehead her masses of heavy hair. “God help us, Linda!” she whispered. “It’s no use. Nothing is any use.”
The young girl slowly and wearily left her bed and, advancing across the room, nestled up against her sister and caressed her in silence.
“What shall we do?” Nance repeated, hardly knowing what she said. “What shall we do? I can’t bear this. I can’t bear it, little one, I can’t bear it!”
As if in response to her appeal, the dog and the infant together sent forth a pitiful wail upon the night.
“What misery there is in the world--what horrible misery!” Nance murmured. “I’m sure we’re all better off dead, than like this. Better off dead, my darling.”
Linda answered by slipping her arms round her waist and hugging her tightly. Then suddenly, “Why don’t we dress ourselves and go out?” she cried. “It’s too hot to sleep. Yes, do let’s do that, Nance! Let’s dress and go out.”
Nance looked at her with a faint smile. There was a childish ardour about her tone that reminded her of the Linda of many years ago. “Very well,” she said, “I don’t mind.”
They dressed hurriedly. The very boldness of the idea helped them to recover their spirits. Bare-headed and in their house-shoes they let themselves out into the street. It was between two and three o’clock. The little town was absolutely silent. The infant in the house opposite made no sound. “Perhaps it’s dead now,” Nance thought.
They walked across the green, and Nance gave a long wistful look at the windows of Baltazar’s cottage. The heavy clouds had lifted a little, and from various points in the sky the stars threw down a faint, uncertain glimmer. It remained, however, still so dark that when they reached the centre of the bridge, neither bank was visible, and the waters of the Loon flowing beneath were hidden in profound obscurity. They leant upon the parapet and inhaled the darkness. What wind there was blew from the west so that the air was heavy with the scent of peat and marsh mud, and the sound of the sea seemed to come from far away, as if it belonged to a different world.