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                                RODMOOR




                               BOOKS BY

                           JOHN COWPER POWYS

        THE WAR AND CULTURE, 1914                         $ .60
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        ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS WITH COMMENTARY, 1916      $ .75
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                       BY THEODORE FRANCIS POWYS

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                      PUBLISHED BY G. ARNOLD SHAW
                   GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, NEW YORK




                                RODMOOR

                               A ROMANCE

                           JOHN COWPER POWYS
                   Author of “Wood and Stone,” etc.

                _O they rade on, and farther on,_
                  _And they waded rivers abune the knee,_
                _And they saw neither sun nor moon_
                  _But they heard the roaring of the sea._
                                               ANONYMOUS.

                            [Illustration]

                                 1916
                            G. ARNOLD SHAW
                               NEW YORK

                            COPYRIGHT, 1916
                           BY G. ARNOLD SHAW

                      COPYRIGHT, IN GREAT BRITAIN
                           AND THE COLONIES

                          VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
                        BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK




                               DEDICATED
                           TO THE SPIRIT OF
                             EMILY BRONTE




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER                                PAGE

        I THE BOROUGH                         1

       II <DW18> HOUSE                         24

      III SEA-DRIFT                          40

       IV OAKGUARD                           49

        V A SYMPOSIUM                        58

       VI BRIDGE-HEAD AND WITHY-BED          73

      VII VESPERS                            87

     VIII SUN AND SEA                       102

       IX PRIEST AND DOCTOR                 118

        X LOW TIDE                          129

       XI THE SISTERS                       139

      XII HAMISH TRAHERNE                   152

     XIII DEPARTURE                         160

      XIV BRAND RENSHAW                     175

       XV BROKEN VOICES                     194

      XVI THE FENS                          212

     XVII THE DAWN                          226

    XVIII BANK-HOLIDAY                      239

      XIX LISTENERS                         264

       XX RAVELSTON GRANGE                  282

      XXI THE WINDMILL                      311

     XXII THE NORTHWEST WIND                337

    XXIII WARDEN OF THE FISHES              352

     XXIV THE TWENTY-EIGHTH OF OCTOBER      375

      XXV BALTAZAR STORK                    409

     XXVI NOVEMBER MIST                     430

    XXVII THRENOS                           447




RODMOOR




I

THE BOROUGH


It was not that he concealed anything from her. He told her quite
frankly, in that first real conversation they had together--on the
little secluded bench in the South London park--about all the morbid
sufferings of his years in America and his final mental collapse.

He even indicated to her--while the sound of grass-mowing came to them
over the rain-wet tulips--some of the most secret causes of this event;
his savage reaction, for instance, against the circle he was thrown
into there; his unhappy habit of deadly introspection; his aching
nostalgia for things less murderously new and raw.

He explained how his mental illness had taken so dangerous, so unlooked
for a shape, that it was only by the merest chance he had escaped long
incarceration.

No; it was not that he concealed anything. It was rather that she
experienced a remote uneasy feeling that, say what he might,--and in
a certain sense he said too much rather than too little--she did not
really understand him.

Her feminine instinct led her to persuade him that she understood; led
her to say what was most reassuring to him, and most consolatory; but
in her heart of hearts she harboured a teasing doubt; a doubt which
only the rare sweetness of these first love-days of her life enabled
her to hide and cover over. Nor was this feeling about her lover’s
confessions the only little cloud on Nance Herrick’s horizon during
these memorable weeks--weeks that, after all, she was destined to look
back upon as so strangely happy.

She found herself, in the few moments when her passionate emotion left
her free to think of such things, much more anxious than she cared to
admit about the ambiguous relations existing between the two persons
dependent upon her. Ever since the death of her father--that prodigal
sailor--three years ago, when she had taken it upon herself to support
both of them by her work in the dressmaker’s shop, she had known that
all was not well between the two. Rachel Doorm had never forgiven
Captain Herrick for marrying again; she felt that instinctively, but it
was only quite recently that she had grown to be really troubled by the
eccentric woman’s attitude to the little half-sister.

Linda’s mother, she knew, had in her long nervous decline rather clung
than otherwise to this grim friend of the former wife; but Linda’s
mother had always been different from other women; and Nance could
remember how, in quite early days, she never interfered when Miss Doorm
took the child away to punish her.

To Nance herself Rachel had always been something of an anxiety. Her
savage devotion had proved over and over again more of a burden than a
pleasure; and now that there was this increased tension between her and
Linda, the thing began to appear invidious, rapacious, sinister.

She was torn, in fact, two ways over the situation. Her own mother had
long ago--and it was one of her few definite recollections of her--made
her swear solemnly never to desert this friend of former days; and the
vows she had registered then to obey this covenant had grown into a
kind of religious rite; the only rite, in fact, after all these years,
she was able to perform for her dead.

And yet if loyalty to her mother kept her patiently tender with
Rachel’s eccentricities, the much warmer feeling she had for her other
parent was stirred indignantly by the thought of any unkindness dealt
out to Linda.

And just at present, it was clear, Linda was not happy.

The young girl seemed to be losing her vivacity and to be growing
silent and reserved.

She was now nearly eighteen; and yet Nance had caught her once or twice
lately looking at Rachel Doorm with the same expression of frightened
entreaty as she used to wear when led away from her mother’s side for
some childish fault. Rachel’s father, a taciturn and loveless old man,
had recently died, leaving his daughter, whom he had practically cast
off, a small but secure annuity and a little house on the east coast.

It was now to this home of her ancestors, in the village of Rodmoor,
that Rachel Doorm was anxious to transport both sisters; partly as a
return for what Nance’s mother, and more recently Nance herself, had
done for her support, and partly out of fanatical devotion to Nance.

The girl could not help experiencing a feeling of infinite relief
at the thought of being freed from her uncongenial work in the
dressmaker’s establishment. Her pleasure, nevertheless, had been
considerably marred, in the last few days, by the attitude of her
sister towards the projected change.

And now, with the realisation of this thrilling new passion possessing
her, her own feeling about leaving London was different from what it
had been at first.

None of these questions interrupted, however, on that particular
afternoon, the girl’s dreamy and absorbed happiness.

In the long delicious intervals that fell between her and her lover
with a perfume sweeter than that of the arrested rain, she let her mind
wander in languid retrospect, from that seat in Kensington Park, over
every one of the wonderful events that had led her to this.

She recalled her first sight of Adrian and how it had come over her,
like an intimation from some higher sphere of being, that her fate was
henceforth to lie, for good and for evil, in that man’s hands.

It was quite early in April when she saw him; and she remembered,
sitting now by his side, how, as each day grew milder, and the first
exquisite tokens of Spring penetrated one by one--here a basket of
daffodils, and there a spray of almond-blossom--into the street she
traversed to her work, she felt less and less inclined to struggle
against the deep delicious thrill that suffused itself, like a warm
indrawing wave, through every pulse of her body. That it should
never have come to her before--that she should have lived absolutely
fancy-free until so near her twenty-third birthday--only made her
abandonment to what she felt now the more sweet and entire.

“It is love,--it is love,” she thought; “and I will give myself up to
it!”

And she had given herself up to it. It had penetrated her with an
exultant inner spring of delight. She had immersed herself in it.
She had gone through her tedious drudgery as if she were floating,
languidly and at ease, on a softly rocking tide. She had lived entirely
in the present. She had not made the least movement even to learn the
name of the man whose wordless pursuit of her had stirred her senses to
this exultant response.

She had felt an indescribable desire to prolong these hours of her
first love, these hours so unreturning, so new and so sweet; a
desire--she remembered it well now--that had a tinge of unformulated
fear about it; as though the very naming, even to herself, of what she
enjoyed, would draw down the jealousy of the invisible powers.

So she had been careful never to stop or linger, in her hurried morning
walks to the historic bridge; careful--after she had once passed him,
and their eyes had met--never so much as to turn her head, to see if he
were following.

And yet she knew--as well in those first days as she knew now--that
every morning and night he waited, wet or fine, to see her go by.

And she had known, too--how could she not know?--that this mute
signalling of two human souls must change and end; must become
something nearer or something farther as time went on. But day by day
she put off this event; too thrilled by the sweet dream in which she
moved, to wish to destroy it, either for better or for worse.

If she had doubted him; doubted that he cared for her; all would have
been different.

Then she would have taken some desperate step--some step that would
have forced him to recognise her for what she was, his one of all,
ready as none else _could_ be ready, to cry with a great cry--“Lord,
behold thine hand-maid; do unto her according to Thy will!” But she had
known he did care. She had felt the magnetic current of his longing, as
if it had been a hand laid down upon her breast.

And in answer she had given herself up to him; given herself, she
thought, with no less complete a yielding than that with which, as she
heard his voice by her side, reaching her through a delicate mist of
delicious dreaming, she gave herself up to him now.

She recalled with a proud gladness the fact that she had never--never
for a moment--in all those days, bestowed a thought on the question
of any possible future with him.