Rodmoor: A Romance

by John Cowper Powys

She stooped to pick up her hat. “I liked it so here,” she added with a wistful catch in her voice, “but it’s all spoilt now.” Sorio did not move. He looked at her gravely.

“You’re a little fool, Nance,” he said, “absolutely a little fool. But you look extraordinarily lovely at this moment, now you’re in a fury. Come here, child, come back and sit down and let’s talk sensibly. There are other things and much more important things in the world than our ridiculous quarrels.”

The tone of his voice had its effect upon her but she did not yield at once.

“I think perhaps to-day,” she murmured, “it would be better to go back.” She continued to stand in front of him, swaying a little—an unconscious trick of hers—and smiling sadly.

“Come and sit down,” he repeated in a low voice. She obeyed him, for it was what her heart ached for, and clinging tightly to him she let her suppressed emotions have full vent. With her head pressed awkwardly against his coat she sobbed freely and without restraint.

Sorio gently buttoned up the fastening of one of her long sleeves which had come unloosed. He did this gravely and without a change of expression. That peculiar and tragic pathos which emanates from a girl’s forgetfulness of her personal appearance did not apparently cross his consciousness. Nance, as she leant against him, had a pitiable and even a grotesque air. One of her legs was thrust out from beneath her skirt. Sorio noticed that her brown shoes were a little worn and did not consort well with her white stockings. It momentarily crossed his mind that he had fancied Nancy’s ankles to be slenderer than it seemed they were.

Her sobs died away at last in long shuddering gasps which shook her whole frame. Sorio kept stroking her head, but his eyes were fixed on the distant river bank along which a heavily labouring horse was tugging at a rope. Every now and then his face contracted a little as if he were in physical pain. This was due to the fact that from the girl’s weight pressing against his knee he began to suffer from cramp. Though her sobs had died down, Nance still seemed unwilling to stir.

With one of her hands she made a tremulous movement in search of his, and he answered it by tightly gripping her fingers. While he held her thus his gaze wandered from the horse on the tow-path and fixed itself upon a large and beautifully spotted fly that was moving slowly and tentatively up a green stalk. With its long antennæ extended in front of it the fly felt its way, every now and then opening and shutting its gauzy wings.

Sorio hated the horse, hated the fly and hated himself. As for the girl who leant so heavily upon him, he felt nothing for her just then but a dull, inert patience and a kind of objective pity such as one might feel for a wounded animal. One deep, far-drawn channel of strength and hope remained open in the remote depths of his mind—associated with his inmost identity and with what in the fortress of his soul he loved to call his “secret”—and far off, at the end of this vista, visualized through clouds of complicated memories—was the image of his boy, his boy left in America, from whom, unknown even to Nance, he received letters week by week, letters that were the only thing, so it seemed to him at this moment, which gave sweetness to his life.

He had sought, in giving full scope to his attraction to Nance, to cover up and smooth over certain jagged, bleeding edges in his outraged mind, and in this, even now, as he returned the pressure of her soft fingers, he recognized that he had been successful.