At that point in their walk, under the glare of a great provision shop, she suddenly became conscious that he was watching her with laughing excitement. “You know!” she cried, “you know!” And it was with difficulty that he persuaded her to let him tell her how he knew, in his own elaborate manner.
This refuge — offered to him thus out of a clear sky, he told her — did in a considerable sense lend him an excuse for taking no steps to find work. And the name of the place — he confessed this with an excited emphasis — had from the beginning strangely affected his imagination.
He saw it sometimes, so he said, that particular word, in a queer visualised manner, dark brown against a colourless and livid sky; and in an odd sort of way it had related itself, dimly, obscurely, and with the incoherence of a half-learnt language, to the wildest and most pregnant symbols of his life.
Rodmoor! The word at the same time allured and troubled him. What it suggested to him — and he made her admit that his ideas of it were far more definite than her own — was no doubt what it really implied: leagues and leagues of sea-bleached forlornness, of sand-dunes and glaucous marshes, of solitary willows and pallid-leaved poplars, of dark pools and night-long-murmuring reeds.
“We’ll have long walks together there!” he exclaimed, interrupting himself suddenly with an almost savage gesture of ardent possession. If it had been any one but Baltazar Stork, he went on, who had sent him this timely invitation, he Would have rejected it at once, but from Baltazar he had no hesitation in accepting anything. They had been friends too long to make any other attitude possible. No, it was no scruple of pride that led him to hesitate — as he admitted to her he had done. It was rather the strange and indefinable reaction set up in his brain by those half-sinister half-romantic syllables — syllables that kept repeating themselves in his inner consciousness.
Nance remembered more than once in a later time the fierce sudden way he turned upon her as they stood on the edge of the crowded square waiting the opportunity to cross and asked, with a solemn intensity in his voice, whether she had any presentiment as to how things would turn out for them in this place.
“It hangs over me,” he said, “it hangs over us both. I see it like a heavy sunset weighted with purple bars.” And then, when the girl did nothing but shake her head and smile tenderly, “I warn you,” he went on, “you are risking much — I feel it — I know it. I have had this sort of instinct before about things.” He shivered a little and laid his hand on her arm as if he clung to her for reassurance.
Nance remembered long afterwards the feelings in her that made her turn her face full upon him and whisper proudly, as if in defiance of his premonitions, “What can happen to us that can hurt us, my dear, as long as we are together, and as long as we love one another?”
He was silent after this and apparently satisfied, for he did not scruple to return to the subject of Rodmoor. The word gave him in those first days, he said, that curious sensation we receive when we suddenly say to ourselves in some new locality, “I have been here; I have seen all this before.”
Had he at that time, he told her, been less distracted by the emotions she aroused in him, he would have analysed to the bottom the dim mental augury — or was it reminiscence? — called up by this name. As it was he just kept the thing at the back of his mind as something which, whatever its occult significance, at least spared him the necessity of agitating himself about his future.
Nance’s thoughts were brought back from their half-attention with a shock of vivid interest when he came to the point, amid his vague recollections, of his first entrance into her house. It was exactly a week ago, he reminded her, that he found himself one sunny morning securely established as a new lodger under her roof. In his impatient longing to secure the desirable room — across the narrow floor of which, he confessed to her, he paced to and fro that day like a hungry tiger — he had even forgotten to make the obvious inquiry as to the quarter of the London sky from which his particular portion of light and air was to come.
It was only, he told her, with a remote segment of his consciousness that he became aware of the fine, full flood of sunshine which poured in from the southern-opening window and lay, mellow and warm, upon his littered books and travel-stained trunk.
Casual and preoccupied were the glances he cast, each time his mechanical perambulation brought him to that pleasant window, at the sun-bathed traffic and the hurrying crowd. London Bridge Road melted into his thought; or rather his thought took possession of London Bridge Road and reduced it to a mere sounding-board for the emotion that obsessed him.
That emotion — and Nance got exquisite pleasure from hearing him say the words, though she turned her face away from him as he said them — took, as he paced his room, passionate and ardent shape. He did not re-vivify the whole of her, — of the fair young being whose sweetness had got into his blood. He confined himself to thinking of the delicate tilt of her head and of the spaciousness between her breasts, spaciousness that somehow reminded him of Pheidian sculpture.
He hadn’t anticipated this particular kind of escape — though it was certainly the escape he had been seeking — amid the roar of London’s streets; but after all, if it did give him his cup of nepenthe, his desired anodyne, how much the more did he gain when it gave him so thrilling an experience in addition? Why, indeed, should he not dream that the gods were for once helping him out and that the generous grace of his girl’s form was symbolic of the restorative virtue of the great Mother herself?
Restoration was undoubtedly the thing he wanted — and in recalling his thoughts of that earlier hour, to her now walking with him, he found himself enlarging upon it all quite unscrupulously in terms of what he now felt — restoration on any terms, at any cost, to the kindly normal paths out of which he had been so roughly thrown. He thrust indignantly back, he told her, that eventful morning the intrusive thought that it was only the Spring that worked so prosperously upon him. He did not want it to be the Spring; he wanted it to be the girl. The Spring would pass; the girl, if his feeling for her — and he glanced at the broad-rimmed hat and shadowy profile at his side — were not altogether illusive, would remain. And it was the faculty for remaining that he especially required in his raft of refuge.
Up and down his room, at any rate, he walked that day with a heightened consciousness such as he had not known for many clouded months. “The Spring”—and in his imaginative reaction to his own memories he grew, so Nance felt with what was perhaps her first serious pang, almost feverishly eloquent—“the Spring, whether I cared to recognise it or not, waved thrilling arms towards me. I felt it”—and he raised his voice so loud that the girl looked uneasily round them—“in the warmth of the sun, in the faces of the wistful shop girls, in the leaves budding against the smoke of the Borough. It had come to me again, and you — you had brought it! It had come to me again, the Eternal Return, the antiphonal world-deep Renewal. It had come, Nance, and all the slums of Rotherhithe and Wapping, and all the chimneys, workshops, wharves and tenements of the banks of this river of yours could not stop the rising of the sap. The air came to me that morning, my girl!”—and he unconsciously quickened his steps as he spoke till, for all her long youthful limbs she could hardly keep pace with him—“as if it had passed over leagues of green meadows. And it had! It had, Nance! And it throbbed for me, child, with the sweetness of your very soul.” He paused for a moment and, as they debouched more directly eastward through a poor and badly lit street, she caught him muttering to himself what she knew was Latin.