Chapter 7
Richard did not succeed in securing any private word with Nelly before he felt it incumbent upon him to say goodbye. The ‘laughing hyena’, as he named Mrs Shotover to himself, grinned her obstinate determination to ‘stick him out’ and be left alone with her young friend. He was only thankful she had a coachman and dog-cart; so that there was no question of his having to walk back with her to West Horthing. He cordially detested her; and made up his mind to attack Nelly on the subject, and express his wonder as to what she could see in such a spiteful and silly old creature!
That’s the worst of England, he thought. It’s such a confounded individualistic country, that a horrible old woman like that as long as she has money and ‘knows the neighbourhood’ can go on indefinitely making herself a general nuisance. In America, he supposed, she would have been put into her place and forced to mend her manners. Well! Well! After all, perhaps, there was something to be said for a system that encouraged everybody to grow into a ‘Character’, either a charming one or the reverse! It was better perhaps to have ‘laughing hyenas’ than monotonous herds of sheep!
The next day was a day of pouring rain and Richard made no attempt to do more than visit the cathedral. He took the opportunity of carrying his notebooks there and reading to himself what he had written. On the whole he was not displeased with the result of his week’s work. He had composed about two hundred lines of this uneven dithyrambic ‘litany of the earth-soul’, its slow growing into consciousness, its use of the sentiency of all living things, its vague ‘dreaming on things to come’.
He became conscious how deeply he had abandoned himself to these English fields and lanes and hedges, to these mossy walls and historic buildings, to these old quiet immemorial traditions.
His return to his native land had stirred a thousand atavistic feelings in him, tastes and prejudices, devotions and queer old attachments.
The lines he had written were full of the sounds and scents of the English country, and the more conscious, more human element in them was religious in the calm reserved English way and was rootedly, but not feverishly, pagan. Dithyrambic in its broken ebb and flow the poem might be; but the music of it was rich and slow and a little heavy — not by any means a song of air and flame! The thing might not be passionate and exciting; but the bleating of flocks was in it, and the sweet breath of cattle, and the patient labours of simple people under the sun and the rain, and the faint sad strange murmurs, like the winds at night, over summer grass, of the dead generations that found their survival in those who came after them.
He returned to his inn late that night, having wandered far through the fields as the evening cleared, along the old canal bank, towards the sea. It had come upon him, as he walked there, especially in passing a particular group of poplar trees, pale and soaked with rain, shivering in the night wind like something human against the orange-coloured skyline, that he had known all this before. Yes, long before, under some other name perhaps, in the unending sequence of the great wayfaring, he must have stood, just as he was standing then, watching those trees whispering to each other with sad tender voices!
And that night he pulled his chair close to the open window and sat for a long while looking out into the silent wet garden, where the darkness itself seemed to exhale an old forgotten fragrance, carrying the mind back to dumb deep-buried memories.
It was one of those hours when a man feels the presence of all the days he has lived through, gathered up and folded together like the crowding of soft innumerable wings; an hour when what is to come hangs palpably imminent, like a vast pregnant shadow, before him, beckoning to those sheltering wings that they should let him go, let him move forward to his fate.
Winnowed and purged by his days with the secrets of words, their mysterious alliances and treacheries, his soul seemed, as he sat at that window, reluctant to break the spell, hovering consciously between a past that was over, its wounds healed, and a future on whose threshold he wavered and hesitated, full of unknown things — beautiful, terrible, pitiful!
He left the window at last with a sense as though he had made, for good or for evil, some great decision; as though at some dark crossroads he had chosen his way, and now could never, through all that should subsequently happen, retrace his footsteps.
Never had Richard sunk into so deep a chasm of dreamless unconsciousness as he slid away into, almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. He awoke the next morning with a feeling as though he had slept not for seven hours, but for seven centuries; he wondered vaguely if he would ever sleep quite in that way again. Was it the very sleep of the ‘earth-soul’ he had been writing about into which, like a child entering the spaciousness of a mother’s dreams, he had been allowed to pass?
He had the queerest feeling as he washed and dressed as though it were necessary to move very quickly, very stealthily and solemnly, about the room. Was some shadowy dead self, some phantom corpse of everything he had been before, actually lying on the bed he had quitted?
He ran downstairs anyway with a distinct feeling of relief from psychic tension and oppressipn. And on the table in the breakfast room, lying on his plate, he found a letter from Nelly. He opened and read it standing by the window, while Trixie Flap, the Crown housemaid, watched him shrewdly, her hand on the mahogany sideboard.
The letter was brief enough.
‘Dear Mr Storm, Please come over and see me. At once, if you don’t mind? It’s impossible to tell you more in a letter. I must talk to somebody. I am very worried, so please come as soon as you get this. In the morning if possible. I’ll look out for you. I am sorry to trouble you.’
And the letter was hurriedly signed, ‘Nelly’.
Richard looked at his watch and then at the self-conscious back of Trixie Flap who was now fidgeting with something on the sideboard.
‘Let’s have some tea at once, Trixie, please,’ he said, seating himself at the table and beginning to cut the loaf. ‘Never mind about the porridge. I’m in a hurry. I’ve got to go somewhere.’
When he next looked at his watch it was after ten and he was already halfway to Littlegate. He could not have given any lucid account of what trees or beasts or rustics he had passed on his way. He might have passed much more remarkable things than early flowering knapweed and they would have been unnoticed. That phrase I’ll look out for you with its pathetic confidence in his friendship had stuck a dart into his heart whose sweet rankling made him oblivious of all outward objects.
He came upon her quite suddenly, leaning against a gate, staring with woebegone eyes in front of her, without hat or gloves. She turned when she heard his step and leaped forward to meet him, her cheeks burning.
She gave him her hand. She made a little hesitating movement as if she would have given him both her hands. Instead of that she gave him the loveliest smile that Richard had ever seen on a human countenance. ‘Thank God you’ve come!’ she said with a sigh of content.
They instinctively moved to the gate which Richard rapidly opened, untwisting its rustic defences with a trembling hand.
‘Let’s get off the road,’ he said. ‘Then we can talk better.’
They risked the wrath of the farmer and crossed the field to the shelter of a large ash tree which grew in the hedge bank. At the foot of this tree they were isolated from the whole world.
It was a hot, still, thundery day, the sun having a semitropical feeling in it owing to the rain that had fallen.
‘I’m afraid the grass is damp,’ said Richard. ‘With that thin dress …’ He looked at her tenderly. ‘Oh, I know!’ he cried impulsively, and taking off his coat he spread it upon the ground.