John Powys: Ducdame

He put on a heavy muffler and overcoat and took his stick in his hand. This stick, a round-handled ash stick, was worn as smooth and glossy by long use as the carved pew of a monk or a hermit’s spade.

Once out in the road they were aware that this stormy night had its own peculiar spirit, a spirit that had something reckless and magnetic in it, disturbing to human nerves. Neither the man nor the girl glanced back toward the white railings of Foulden Bridge, railings which had not yet been mended. Lexie kept talking and gesticulating; pointing with his hand in the direction from which the sound seemed to proceed; and laughing in his deep, chuckling, almost leonine manner over the strange fantasy of this belated showman in coming to such a place in the month of November.

He led his companion at a quick pace, past the house of Mr. Pod, past the entrance to Marsh Alley, until he brought her to a small enclosed field on the north of the village where such entertainers were wont to encamp when they visited that district.

The sound of the music increased in volume as they approached and was combined with spasmodic shrieks from the primitive engine that worked the roundabout, with the noisy shouts of young men, the laughter and giggling of girls, and the cries of children.

The wind was still blowing so violently that the rough naphtha-lighted tent, in the midst of which the wooden horses gyrated, shook and shivered and tugged at its supports to such an alarming degree that the older villagers hesitated to enter for fear of having the whole thing come down about their ears.

Lexie led Nell to the rear of a little crowd of wind-blown spectators who were standing at the entrance to the tent.

“It’s late in the year, isn’t it, for this kind of thing?” he remarked to a sturdily built stranger who was bending over one of the tent pegs, making the rope more secure.

“Late? I should think it was late,” replied the man in a surly tone. Then, when he took in the personality of Lexie: “We’re due in Bishop’s Forley to-night, sir,” he added, “and we stay there for the winter. I said myself ’twere a fool thing to stop here with the weather so had; but he would have it so; and so here we are!”

“I’ve never known a merry-go-round in Ashover later than October,” repeated Lexie gravely, moving forward with Nell into the tent.

The engine happened to stop at that moment, and as the boys and girls who had been riding clambered down, and another instalment prepared to mount, a quick whisper ran round among them and many eyes were turned upon the couple.

Nell pulled him by the arm. “Let’s get away,” she whispered. “They’re noticing us.”

But it chanced that a particularly grotesque piebald horse had stopped just in front of Lexie. This horse possessed an unscrupulous and world-embracing eye, an eye upon whose yellow-tinted orb the flame of the naphtha lamps shone luridly, giving it an almost Cyclopean look.

“One minute!” the young man said. And leaving his companion standing there alone, white-faced and disconcerted, he climbed up with careful deliberation upon the animal’s back.

The music soon recommenced; and the fantastic circle of horses and riders revolved once more, to a pandemonium of raucous sounds.

“Looksee! Looksee!” cried one of the children. “There be Master Lexie, a-ride-a-cock-horsin’ same as we!”

Nell, in her black dress and black hat, was the cynosure of many astonished eyes. She knew them all, but she carefully avoided meeting the glance of any one in particular. Na one in the tent was bold enough to address her; the older people moving discreetly away to the farther side of the engine, the children crowding up as near to her as they dared but only whispering to each other in low tones that were drowned in the noise of the brazen din.

She herself stared helplessly at Lexie’s figure, in its frayed overcoat and blue muffler, appearing and disappearing with punctual regularity, like some sign of the Zodiac in a clock-work heaven.

The piebald horse he rode lost most of its individual character in that whirling revolution; but Nell could still catch the staring voracity of its insatiable eye, an eye that remained fixed upon her with an expression that was neither sympathetic nor derisive; an expression of simple devouring interest.

As to Lexie himself, his own lineaments were composed into a fixed and smiling mask of infantile complacence. One of his eyelids was lifted a little higher than the other in a kind of ecstasy of ironic roguery; but the glance he directed toward his companion as he passed her by in his gyrations had in it a sublime acceptance of destiny worthy of the animal on whose back he rode.

The noise in the young man’s ears was deafening; and as he listened to it, giving himself up to the motion, his mind began wandering off to other sounds of a less artificial character that were at that moment rising up toward the cloud-covered sky from his native Frome-side.

He thought of the way the branches were creaking even now among the Scotch firs on Heron’s Ridge. He imagined the grunt of a badger as it trotted in the moaning wind across Titty’s Ring. He heard the cattle stirring drowsily in their bartons. He heard the splash of a perch in Saunders’ Hole and the cry of a stray mallard drifting across the marshes toward Comber’s End. Out of the heart of that brazen clamour he seemed to be listening to the tiny German clock ticking the hour in his mother’s bedroom. He even fancied he could hear the quiet breathing in its guarded cradle of the small head of his House, the young new Squire of Ashover. And then suddenly, as in his fantasy he counted up these unnoticed sounds of the night, it seemed to him that he could actually catch the whirring of owl wings hovering about his elm tree in the churchyard, as they had done in the moonlight, just a year ago, when he met his brother at that place.

Before the music stopped or the rotation of the wheel of horses and riders came to a standstill, Lexie jumped down on the ground by Nell’s side. He took her by the arm and led her out of the tent where they were met in the darkness by that familiar smell of an enclosure of grass trodden by men and beasts, the precise savour of which none know who have not been to fairs and circuses in country villages.

“The hobbyhorse is forgot!” he muttered; and the girl was bewildered by the fierce intensity of his grip upon her arm. The wind seemed to blow against his face at that moment with an ice-cold menace, as of some breath from the outer spaces. He gathered his forces together to resist this threat; and instinctively, in so doing, he let his arm in the darkness enclose Nell’s waist.

“Don’t let’s go back just yet,” he pleaded. “Netta won’t mind waiting a little for supper.”

The girl was so startled and shocked by the change in his manner as they came out of the tent that, in her pity for him, she did not have the heart to resist. But the touch of her warm young body, as he pressed her against him, soon restored him.

He led her down a grassy rain-soaked lane; one of those lanes on the outskirts of a village that usually end in nothing more hospitable than some isolated group of cattle sheds or pigsties.

What in this case they stumbled upon, however, was an open barn; and Lexie was enchanted beyond measure to detect in its cavernous obscurity a mass of sweet-smelling piled-up hay.

But Nell hesitated now and drew back when, with an exclamation of unashamed delight, he pulled at her hand to lead her forward into this shrine of Demeter.

“Let’s go home, Lexie,” she begged. “My shoes and stockings are soaking, and I’m sure yours must be! We really oughtn’t to keep Netta waiting any longer.”

But it was not easy to resist the wistful and humorous appeals, some of them almost querulous in their childishness, with which he implored her; and she yielded at last.