Part 24
Once more she was silent but with a slight veering of the wind, the sound of the waves beyond the sand-dunes came to them with pitiless distinctness. It seemed to mock--this voice of the earth’s antagonist--mock, in triumphant derision, the forlorn hope which that solemn invocation had roused in the girl’s heart. But in contending against Mrs. Renshaw’s knowledge of the Psalms even the North Sea had met its match. With her pale face uplifted and a wild light in her eyes, she continued to utter the old melodious incantations with their constant references to a Power more formidable than “all thy waves and storms.” She might have been one of the early converts to the faith that came from the sacred Desert, wrestling in spiritual ecstasy with the gods and powers of those heathen waters.
Either by one of the fortunate coincidences which sometimes interrupt even the irony of nature or, as Mrs. Renshaw would herself have maintained, by a direct answer to her prayer, the weathercock on the church tower swung round again. North-east it swung, then north-north-east, then due north. And finally, even while she was uttering her last antiphony, it pointed to north-west, the quarter most alien and antagonistic to the Rodmoor sea, the portion of the horizon from which blew the wind of the great fens.
In a country like East Anglia so peculiarly at the mercy of the elements, every one of the winds has its own peculiar burden and brings with it something healing and restorative or baleful and malefic. The east wind here is, in a paramount sense, the evil wind, the accomplice and confederate of the salt deep, the blighter of hopes, the herald of disaster. The north-west wind, on the contrary, is the wind that brings the sense of inland spaces, the smell of warm, wet earth and the fragrance of leaf mould in sweet breathing woods. It is the wind that fills the rivers and the wells and brings the fresh purifying rain. It is a wind full of memories and its heart is strong with the power of ancient love, revived even out of graves and sepulchres. To those sensitive to finer and rarer earth influences among the dwellers by the east coast there may be caught sometimes upon the north-west wind the feeling of pine woods and moorland heather. For it comes from the opposite side of the great plain, from Brandon Heath and even beyond and it finds nothing in the wide fen country to intercept it or break the rush of its sea-ward passage.
Thus, when the two women rose finally to their feet it was to be met by a cool, healing breath which, as it bowed the ranks of the hollyhocks and rustled through the trees, had in it a delicious odour of inland brooks and the coming of pure rain.
“Listen to me, child,” said Mrs. Renshaw as they passed out of the churchyard, “I want to say this to you. You mustn’t think that God allows any intercourse between the living and the dead. That is a wicked invention of our own sinful hearts. It is a temptation, darling--a temptation of the devil--and we must struggle against it. Whenever we feel it we must struggle against it and pray. It is perfectly right for you to think gently and forgivingly of poor Miss Doorm. It were wrong to think otherwise. But you mustn’t think of her as anywhere near us or about us now. She’s in the hands of God and in the mercy of God and we must leave her there. Do you hear what I’m saying, Linda? Do you understand me? Anything else is wrong and evil. We are all sinners together and we are all in the same merciful hands.”
Never was the exorcising of powers hurtful to humanity more effective. Linda bowed her head at her words and then raising it freely, walked with a lighter step than for seven long days. She wished in her heart that she had the courage to talk to Mrs. Renshaw about an anxiety much more earthly, much less easy to be healed, than the influence of Rachel Doorm, alive or dead, but so immense was her relief at that moment to be free from the haunting phantom that had been pulling her towards that mound in the churchyard that she found it in her heart to be hopeful and reckless even though she knew that, whatever happened, there was bound to be pain and trouble in store for her in the not far distant future.
XXIII
WARDEN OF THE FISHES
It will be found not altogether devoid of a strange substratum of truth, though fantastic enough in the superficial utterance, the statement that there are certain climacteric seasons in the history of places when, if events of importance are looming upon the horizon, they are especially liable to fall. Such a season with regard to Rodmoor, or at least with regard to the persons we are most concerned with there, may be said to have arrived with the beginning of Autumn and with the month of October.
The first weeks of this month were at any rate full of exciting and fatal interest to Nance. Something in the change of the weather, for the rains had come in earnest now, affected Sorio in a marked degree. His whole being seemed to undergo some curious disintegrating process as difficult to analyze as the actual force in Nature which was at that very time causing the fall of the leaves. We may be allowed to draw at least this much from Sorio’s own theory of the universal impulse to self-destruction--the possible presence, that is to say, of something positive and active, if not personal and conscious, in the processes of natural decadence. Life, when it corrupts and disintegrates; life when it finally falls away and becomes what we call death, does so sometimes, or seems to do so, with a vehemence and impetuosity which makes it difficult not to feel the pressure of some half-conscious “will to perish” in the thing thus plunging towards dissolution. The brilliant colour which many flowers assume when they approach decease bears out this theory. It is what the poet calls a “lightning before death” and the rich tints of the autumn foliage as well as the phosphorescent glories--only repulsive to our human senses in fatal association--of physical mortality itself, are symbols, if not more than symbols, of the same splendid rushing upon nothingness.
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 north-west 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.
In her own mind, as the weeks slipped by and their names had already been coupled twice in the Sunday services, Nance was taking thought as to what, in solid reality, she intended to do with this child-man of hers when the great moment came. She must move from their present lodging. _That_ seemed certain. It also seemed certain that Linda would have still to go on living with her. Any other arrangement than that was obviously unthinkable. But where should they live? And could she, with the money at present at her disposal, support three people?
A solution was found to both these problems by Mr. Traherne. There happened to exist in Rodmoor, as in many other old decaying boroughs on the east coast, certain official positions the practical service of which was almost extinct but whose local prestige and financial emoluments, such as they were, lingered on unaffected by the change of conditions. The relentless encroachments of the sea upon the land were mainly responsible for this. In certain almost uninhabited villages there existed official persons whose real raison d’être lay with the submerged foundations of former human habitations, deep at the bottom of the waters.
It was, indeed, one of the essential peculiarities of life upon those strange sea-banks this sense of living on the edge, as it were, of the wave-drowned graves of one’s fathers. It may have been the half-conscious knowledge of this, bred in their flesh and blood from infancy, that gave to the natives of those places so many unusual and unattractive qualities. Other abodes of men rest securely upon the immemorial roots of the past, roots that lie, layer beneath layer, in rich historic continuity endowing present usages and customs with the consecration of unbroken tradition. But in the villages of that coast all this is different. Tradition remains, handed down from generation to generation, but the physical continuity is broken. The east-coast dwellers resemble certain of the stellar bodies in the celestial spaces, they retain their identity and their names but they are driven, in slow perpetual movement, to change their physical position. In scriptural phrase, they have no “abiding-place” nor can they continue “in one stay.”
The fishing boats of the present generation set their brown sails to cross the water where, some hundreds of years before, an earlier generation walked their cobbled streets. The storm-buoys rock and ring and the boat lanterns burn their wavering signals over the drowned foundations that once supported Town-Hall and church tower, Market place and Village Tavern. It is this slow, century-delayed flight from the invading tide which so often produces in East Anglian coast towns the phenomenal existence of two parish churches, both it may be still in use, but the later and newer one following the heart of the community in its enforced retreat. Thus it is brought about in these singular localities that the very law of the gods, the law which utters to the elements the solemn “thus far and no further” is as a matter of fact, daily and momently, though with infinite slowness, broken and defied.
It is perhaps small wonder that among the counties of England these particular districts should have won for themselves a sinister reputation for impiety and perversity. Nothing so guards and establishes the virtue of a community than its sense of the presence in its midst of the ashes of its generations. Consciously and in a thousand pious usages it “worships its dead.” But East-Anglian coast-dwellers are not permitted this privilege. Their “Lares and Penates” have been invaded and submerged. The fires upon their altars have been drowned and over the graves of their fathers the godless tides ebb and flow without reverence. Fishes swim where once children were led to the font and where lovers were wedded the wild cormorant mocks the sea-horses with its disconsolate cry. It is easy to be believed that the remote descendants of human beings who actually walked and bartered and loved and philosophized on spots of ground now tangled with seaweed and sea-drift, and with fathoms of moaning and whispering water above them, should come in their hour to depart in a measure from the stable and kindly laws of human integrity! With the ground thus literally _moving_--though in age-long process--_under their feet_, how should they be as faithful as other tribes of men to what is permanent in human institution?
There was perhaps a certain congruity in the fact that now, after all these ages of tidal malice, it was in the interests of so singular an alien as Sorio--one whose very philosophy was the philosophy of “destruction”--that this lingering on of offices, whose service had been sea-drowned, remained as characteristic of the place. But this is precisely what did occur.
There was in Rodmoor a local official, appointed by the local town council, whose title, “The Warden of the Fishes,” carried the mind back to a time when the borough, much larger then, had been a considerable centre of the fishing industry. This office, tenable for life, carried with it very few actual duties now but it ensured a secure though small emolument and, what was more important, the occupancy, free of rent, of one of the most picturesque houses in the place, an old pre-Elizabethan dwelling of incommodious size but of romantic appearance, standing at the edge of the harbour.
The last incumbent of this quaint and historic office, whose duties were so little onerous that they could be performed by a very old and very feeble man, was a notable character of the village called John Peewit Swinebitter, whose chief glory was not attained until the close of his mortal days, which ended under the table in the Admiral’s Head after a surfeit of the very fish of which he was “warden” washed down by too copious libations of Keith-Radipole ale.
Since Mr. Swinebitter’s decease in June, there had gone on all through July and August, a desperate rivalry between two town factions as to the choosing of his successor and it was Mr. Traherne’s inspired notion to take advantage of this division to secure the post for Nance’s prospective husband.
Sorio, though of foreign blood, was by birth and nationality English and moreover he had picked up, during his stay in Rodmoor, quite as much familiarity with the ways and habits of fish as were necessary for that easy post. If, at any unforeseen crisis, more scientific and intimate knowledge was required than was at his disposal, there was always Dr. Raughty, a past master in all such matters, to whom he could apply. It was Mr. Traherne’s business to wheedle the local rivals into relinquishing their struggle in favour of one who was outside the contention and when this was accomplished the remaining obstacles in the way of the appointment were not hard to surmount. Luckily for the conspirators, Brand Renshaw, though the largest local landowner and a Justice of the Peace, was not on the Rodmoor council.
So skillfully did Mr. Traherne handle the matter and so cautious and reserved was Nance that it was not till after the final reading of their bans in the church on the marshes and the completion of the arrangements for their marriage at the end of the following week, that even Baltazar Stork became aware of what was in the wind.
Sorio himself had been extremely surprised at this unexpected favour shown him by the local tradesmen. He had brooded so long upon his morbid delusion of universal persecution that it seemed incredible to him, in the few interviews which he had with these people, that they should treat him in so courteous and kind a manner. As a matter of fact, so fierce and obstinate were their private dissensions, it was a genuine relief to them to deal with a person from outside; nor must it be forgotten that in the appointment of Nance’s husband to the coveted post they were doing honour to the memory of the bride’s father, Captain Herrick having been by far the most popular of all the visitors to Rodmoor in former times. Most of the older members of the council could well remember the affable sailor. Many of them had frequently gone out fishing with him in the days when there were more fish and rarer fish to be caught than there were at present--those “old days” in fact which, in most remote villages, are associated with stuffed wonders in tavern parlours and with the quips and quirks of half-legendary heroes of Sport and Drink.