John Powys: Ducdame

The first outward indication of this vita nuova in the sick man was the frequency of his visits to Toll-Pike Cottage where Netta was still staying on as Nell’s guest. More than once Nell came alone to share some meal with him in his own house; and by the time the first two weeks of November were over, there had been some very uncomfortable scenes with Mrs. Bellamy, who passionately resented these unconventional entertainments.

In the middle of November there happened to fall upon Frome-side a long unaccountable spell of gusty westerly wind. It was a peculiar wind that thus came to that Dorset valley over the orchards and moors of Somersetshire. It was an intermittent wind, with wild spurts of incredibly thin rain, rain so fine and vapoury that it soaked to the core whatever it approached and made man and beast, and even the trees of the field, bend and bow and sway and crouch, when its chilly gusts swept over them and enveloped them.

It was at the close of one of the worst of these persecuted days that Netta Page came to bid farewell to her buried friend.

The rain had ceased with the fall of twilight, but not one flower upon the grave she came to greet had that persistent wind left intact. What disfigured wreaths did remain on the mound of disturbed loam were reduced to shapeless tangles of string and stalks.

The wind kept blowing her hair loose from under her hat. It swept her cloak against her figure. It whirled round her in eddies and spirals. It blew leaves and twigs against her face and made it difficult for her to breathe as it beat furiously against her mouth and nostrils. She kept forming words in her throat; and it was to herself as if she uttered them. But whether any real sound would have come forth from her lips, even if this tempest had ceased, is more than doubtful.

But she was talking to the shrouded form beneath her; and, coherent or incoherent, her words had their relief for her own soul….

“You needn’t fret any more about him or her or me or any one! It’s all right, Rook dear. Everything is all right.”

The force of the wind made her lift both hands to her rain-drenched hat; but even that movement did not prevent two long wisps of hair from detaching themselves from the rest and blowing like tattered streamers behind her. Hurriedly she sank down on her knees and pressed her face against the soaked clay.

The descending darkness swept over her and covered her, separating her from the rest of the world.

Over Antiger Woods, over Dorsal, over Battlefield, like some enormous arrow-stricken dying bird, that darkness came upon her; and though her mind was too absorbed in her grief to be conscious of anything external it is likely enough that the swallowing up of all shapes and contours and colours in the one great wave of blackness made it easier for her to feel that she and what lay down there beneath her were for that moment undivided.

So dependent are the minds of human beings upon these outward tokens, so pitiably do they cling to the least vestige of any “real presence” of what they have loved, that the worst pang of loss that Netta was ever destined to know came when at last, stiff and shivering, she moved away from that spot.

It is significant that these holes dug in churchyard clay are not refilled and covered up, so as to be left just level with the surrounding sod! For it is these tragic hillocks, themselves so nearly resembling enshrouded human shapes, that give us the last illusion of our sorrow, the idea that they actually wrap up and enfold that form which in reality lies so far below!

Netta stumbled several times in the darkness over other graves, graves that were no more to; her mind than so many ridges of obstructing turf clods; but she reached the road at last; and when she did reach it and began to make her way with heavy dragging steps back to the cottage, though the storm of her grief had exhausted itself, what took its place was a cold, dull, inert recognition of that unbridgeable gulf between the living and the dead which the assuaging ritual of all the centuries leaves still exposed — yawning; gaping, uncrossed.

She found the door of the cottage left open to admit her; but the fire was almost out in the little parlour and the house was empty.

As she went to and fro among the deserted rooms, making weary and half-mechanical preparations for her own and her companion’s evening meal, she fancied she heard the sound of loud harsh music coming from the direction of the village. She opened the kitchen door and listened. Certainly there was something going on. Oh! This was the worst of it; that a human soul is not even allowed to live in quiet with its own loss. Life must be rushing, jerking, trailing, dancing, howling forward, just the same; and for ever deriding the least attempt to hold it back, to strike it into silence!

“It sounds like a whirligig,” she thought as she closed the door. “I didn’t know they had whirligigs in the country.” When the meal was prepared and all was ready for Nell’s return she sat down listlessly on a chair in the kitchen, listening to that harsh music in the distance, to the purring of the Marquis of Carabas, to the ticking of the clock. Once she started, fancying she heard a sound on the floor above. She thought how queer it was that rooms where people had died should be endowed with more life than other rooms; and that the very boards should creak and the very soot fall dawn the chimney with a sort of intense and solemn self-consciousness!

She wanted to concentrate her mind an a hundred little incidents of her life with Rook; but instead of being able to do this she was compelled, as if by an inner command, to listen intently to hear whether another board would creak up there in Hastings’s room….

Netta was not the only one who had heard the strains of music that November evening. A couple of hours before, just after she had taken her hat and cloak and gone out into the twilight, the unexpected sound had reached the ears of her two friends as they sat together in the very place where she was sitting now.

“Listen!” cried Lexie eagerly, leaping to his feet and running out into the back garden. The girl followed and he turned to her with an expression of childish delight. “It’s a roundabout!” he chuckled. “Who would have thought it possible as late in the year as this and on a night like this? I’ve known them to come in October on their way to London; but never in November!”

He looked round him. It was nearly dark now; and, although the rain had stopped, the wind was moaning disconsolately in the trees above the wall and was tossing the bare stalks of the raspberry canes against the posts of the empty clothes line.

It was one of those evenings in which foot travellers on country roads lean for a while over some wet stile or gate and survey the faint whitish glimmer in the sad west, and listen to the splash of raindrops from some tall elm above their heads as a disturbed starling or pigeon tumbles out of

“When was the last merry-go-round you saw, Nell?” he asked. And there was a tone in his voice as if he were deliberately defying the forlornness of earth and air and sky.

“I’ve never seen one in Ashover, Lexie,” she answered.

“Well, you shall see one!” he cried. “For I’ll show you one. I can take a girl to a circus of a cold November night as well as another!”

“But, Lexie—” she began.

He swept aside her objections. “Come!” he cried. “Get your things on! It’ll do us good to have a bit of sport.”

He hurried her back into the house and made her put on her cape and hat, both of them composed of new mourning black, bought at a shop in Tollminster.

As he held her cloak for her, she was struck by the manner in which the faded tweed suit he wore had grown by daily use to become a kind of animal’s skin. No human being’s clothes, seen without the wearer, could be more characteristic, more living, than Lexie Ashover’s! The effect was enhanced by the perpetual presence of some dead hedge weed or another left in his buttonhole as it might have been left on the shaft of a cart or at the bottom of a wicker basket.