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.