Sorio’s suggestion outraged something in her that went down to the very root of her personality. Walking with him, swimming with him, rowing in a boat with him — all those things were harmonious to her mind and congruous with her personal charm. None of these things interfered with the play of her intelligence, with the poise, the reserve, the aloofness of her spiritual challenge. She was exceptionally devoid of fear in these boyish sports and could feel herself when she engaged in them with him, free of the limitations of her sex. She could retain completely, as she indulged herself in them, all the equilibrium of her being — the rhythm of her identity. But this proposal of Sorio’s not only introduced a discordant element that had a shrewd vein of the ludicrous in it, it threw her into a physical panic. It pulled and tugged at the inmost fibres of her self-restraint. It made her long to sit down on the ground and cry like a child. She wondered vaguely whether it was that Adrian was revenging himself upon her at that moment for some accumulated series of half-physical outrages that he had himself in his neurotic state been subjected to lately. As to his actual sanity, it never occured to her to question that. She herself was too wayward and whimsical in the reactions of her nerves and the processes of her mind to find anything startling, in that sense, in what he was now suggesting. It was simply that it changed their relations — it destroyed her ascendency, it brought things down to brute force, it turned her into a woman.
Her mind, as she stood hesitating, reviewed the moth incident. That sort of situation — Adrian’s fantastic mania for rescuing things — had just the opposite effect on her. He might poke his stick into half the ditches of Rodmoor and save innumerable drowning moths; the only effect that had on her was to make her feel superior to him, better adapted than he to face the essential facts of life, its inherent and integral cruelty for instance. But now — to see that horrible rope-end dangling from that gaping hole and to see the eager, violent, masculine look in her friend’s eyes — it was unendurable; endurable; it drove her, so to speak, against the jagged edge of the world’s brute wall.
“To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,
Is delicate and rare—”
she found herself quoting, with a horrible sense that the humour of the parody only sharpened the sting of her dilemma.
“I won’t do it,” she said resolutely at last, trying to brave it out with a smile. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Besides, I’m much too heavy. You couldn’t pull me up if you tried till nightfall! No, no, Adriano, don’t be so absurd. Don’t spoil our time together with these mad ideas. Let’s sit down here and talk. Or why not light a fire? That would be exciting enough, wouldn’t it?”
His face as he listened to her darkened to a kind of savage fury. Its despotic and imperious lines emphasized themselves to a degree that was really terrifying.
“You won’t?” he cried, “you won’t, you won’t?” And seizing her roughly by the shoulder he actually began twisting the rope round her body.
She resisted desperately, pushing him away with all the strength of her arms. In the struggle between them, which soon became a dangerous one, her hand thrusting back his head unintentionally drew blood with its delicate finger-nails from his upper lip. The blood trickled into his mouth and, maddened by the taste of it, he let her go and seizing the end of the rope, struck her with it across the breast. This blow seemed to bewilder her. She ceased all resistance. She became docile and passive in his hands.
Mechanically he went on with the task he had set himself, of fastening the rope round her beneath her arm-pits and tying it into a knot. But her absolute submissiveness seemed presently to paralyze him as much as his previous violence had disarmed and paralyzed her. He unloosed the knot he was making and with a sudden jerk pulled the rope away from her. The rope swung back to its former position and dangled in the air, swaying gently from side to side. They stood looking at each other in startled silence and then, quite suddenly, the girl moved forward and flung her arms round his neck.
“I love you!” she murmured in a voice unlike any he had heard her use before. “I love you! I love you!” and her lips clung to his with a long and passionate kiss.
Sorio’s emotions at that moment would have caused her, had she been conscious of them, a reaction even less endurable than that which she had just been through. To confess the truth he had no emotion at all. He mechanically returned her kisses; he mechanically embraced her. But all the while he was thinking of those water-beetles with shiny metallic coats that were gyrating even now so swiftly round that reedy pool.
“Water-beetles!” he thought, as the girl’s convulsive kisses, salt with her passionate tears, hurt his wounded lip. “Water-beetles! We are all like that. The world is like that! Water-beetles upon a dark stream.”
She let him go at last and they moved out together hand in hand into the open air. Above them the enormous windmill still upheld its motionless arms while from somewhere in the fens behind it came a strange whistling cry, the cry of one of those winged intruders from foreign shores, which even now was perhaps bidding farewell to regions of exile and calling out for some companion for its flight over the North Sea.
With his hand still held tightly in hers, Philippa walked silently by his side all that long way across the meadows and dykes. Sorio took advantage of her unusually gentle mood and began plaintively telling her about the nervous sufferings he endured in Rodmoor and about his hatred for the people there and his conviction that they took delight in annoying him. Then little by little, as the girl’s sympathetic silence led him on, he fell to flinging out — in short, jerky, broken sentences — as if each word were torn up by the roots from the very soil of his soul, stammered-references to Baptiste. He spoke as if he were talking to himself rather than to her. He kept repeating over and over again some muttered phrase about the bond of abnormal affection which existed between them. And then he suddenly burst out into a description of Baptiste. He rambled on for a long while upon this topic, leaving in the end only a very blurred impression upon his hearer’s mind. All, in fact, the girl was able to definitely arrive at from what he said was that Baptiste resembled his mother — a Frenchwoman of the coast of Brittany — and that he was tall and had dark blue eyes.
“With the longest lashes,” Sorio kept repeating, as if he were describing to her some one it was important she should remember, “that you, or any one else, has ever seen! They lie on his cheek when he’s asleep like — like—”
He fumbled with the feathery head of a reed he had picked as they were walking but seemed unable to find any suitable comparison. It was curious to see the shamefaced, embarrassed way he threw forth, one by one, and as if each word caused him definite pain in the uttering, these allusions to his boy.
Philippa let him ramble on as he pleased, hardly interrupting him by a gesture, listening to him, in fact, as if she were listening to a person talking in his sleep. She learnt that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he had persuaded Baptiste to keep his position in New York and not fling everything up and follow him to London. She learnt that Baptiste had copied out with his own hand the larger portion of Sorio’s book and that now, as he completed each new chapter, he sent it by registered mail straight to the boy in “Eleventh Street.”