John Powys: Ducdame

Ah, he had pushed his chair back in there and put down the pen. She could see him as clearly as if the wood against which she leaned had been glass. She saw how his white hands clasped themselves upon his stomach, just where the little gold cross hung down. Oh, loathing! Loathing! Loathing! What was this? She was downstairs now, pulling on her cloak. Bang! The door had shut behind her and she was in the garden. Click! The gate had swung behind her and she was in the road.

Where was she going?

It was not till she had walked some hundreds of yards down the road that she knew she was going to Lexie Ashover’s. That was the last resort, then! That was what her feet would do with her when her mind ceased to act!

All the rest of the way she remained drugged and numb; and even at Lexie’s door she was still too dazed to catch the look of disapproval with which Mrs. Bellamy regarded her, or to realize until she had removed her cloak in Lexie’s room that she had forgotten to take off her apron.

Lexie had been more submissive to his doctor during the last week, and the girl was touched to see how this relapse into an invalid state had affected his spirits. He seemed to have lost something of his accustomed vein of humorous malice.

He removed a pile of books from the lap of a leather armchair and made her sit opposite him, scanning her face with a certain whimsical intensity as children in fairy books scan the faces of human-speaking animals.

The pallor of the day increased the natural pallor of her skin. Her oval forehead with the silky hair falling on each side of it seemed to carry more human sadness under its tender curves than any mere personal trouble could account for. Lexie’s flickering fire threw softening lights upon this sorrow, without touching its lodged hurt.

His own cue, it seemed, was a low confidential tone of intimate gravity. “You know what happened after we talked in the churchyard that night? They came to see me … in the morning … just as you have come now … and Ann was more Ann than I’ve ever seen her. I couldn’t stand it. It was too much. But whether Netta heard what I said, or understood what I meant, the Lord alone knows! They were both dripping wet and I packed them off. But I’m sure Ann understands. You know what I’m like when I get rattled, Nell. I don’t beat about the bush.”

A faint little smile crossed the visitor’s face.

“What did you say to her?”

“I said she’d come to ‘square’ me.”

“Lexie! Did you say that?”

“Why not? I believe in bringing everything right out into the air. I like to see the little horns protruding and the furry ears pricked up. I like to see the sharp claws under the velvet pads.”

“But, Lexie, did Netta hear what you said? Oh, Lexie! How awful!”

“I tell you they were both so dripping wet that it was all very confused. It was like quarrelling in a laundry. You could smell their drenched clothes. You could smell their wet skins. Poor Netta stood on one leg like a rain-soaked heron, and Ann looked as if she didn’t know her head from her tail. It was an entertaining scene, only I was too rattled to enjoy it.”

“But do you really mean that Ann is trying to come between Netta and Rook?”

“Nell, I’m ashamed of you! Don’t you know that women like that never come between people in that way?”

“In what kind of way do they do it, then?”

Lexie made a face at her as if he were playing at bears with a young child.

“They don’t do anything,” he said. “They just look on till it happens.”

Nell raised herself very straight in her chair and met Lexie’s grimace eye to eye.

“If she entangles Rook and makes Netta unhappy it’ll be a cruel, scandalous, wicked shame!”

Her violent words had their effect. Lexie got up, shuffled to the mantelpiece, and leaning his elbow against the corner of it looked down with concern into her face.

“I suppose,” he said solemnly, “it has never occurred to you that Rook may be thoroughly tired of both of them.”

She frowned and tilted back her head to get the full significance of this, and the young man was aware of something more vibrant and tense in her manner than he had realized at first.

He began to wonder about the apron, too, which she had now untied from her waist and was mechanically folding upon her lap.

“Tired of both of them,” she repeated; and then, avoiding his eyes and dropping her head—“He used to be very fond of Ann before he met Netta, didn’t he?”

Lexie seemed to derive a mischievous satisfaction from delaying his answer to this question. He took his elbow from the chimneypiece and placed his hand upon the back of her chair.

She kept her head bent, but the next thing he did was done in so casual and natural a way that it was very difficult for her to take offence at it. He lifted up her chin with two fingers and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

“Did you say ‘fond of Ann’?” he cried. “He used to make love to her for whole summers. They used to stay out all night. My mother never knew half that went on. They were a fair pair; and I daresay Ann fell in love with him for ever and ever. She’s certainly had endless chances of being married since, though she’s only twenty-five — did you realize that, Nell? — only twenty-five now.”

The girl sighed and, instead of returning his smile, looked abstractedly into the fire. Lexie suddenly remembered how Rook had grown remote and sullen when he rallied him in the churchyard.

“It’s these two now,” he said to himself. “I knew it.” And then, lifting whimsically one of his heavy eyelids:

“I only hope,” he thought, surveying the abstracted head and tilted shoulders beneath him; “I only hope the Reverend William will wear his horns with a good grace. For he’ll have ’em. And good luck to him!”

Reluctant to break the spell of his companion’s mood, thus scandalously interpreted, Lexie sank back into his armchair and rubbed his thin knees with outspread hands.

Oh, that he might only stay conscious, in this exciting chaotic world, three, six, ten, fifteen years longer!

The silence between them lasted for several minutes without a sound entering the room. Not a pulse stirred in all that sapless yellow world of vegetable mortality outside, from which the odour of accepted death mounted into the air.

Finally the girl came to herself and began to speak hurriedly and nervously, pinching the folded apron on her lap as if it were an object for sale upon a counter.

“I don’t know why I should tell you these things — but there’s no one else — I’ve got no one else — I don’t think I can stand it any more. — It isn’t that he’s unkind to me or anything like that — he’s always the same. — It isn’t that he troubles me with questions — he doesn’t notice anything — never anything! It isn’t that he touches me”—she gave a little movement that made Lexie stop rubbing his knees—“he’s quite given up doing that. It isn’t that he reads to me what he writes”—her mouth twitched and her forehead puckered—“it isn’t that he talks to me about what he writes. — He never talks to any one. — It’s just— Oh, Lexie!”—and she leaned forward with wide-open eyes and the apron crushed between her hands—“it’s just the things he’s thinking and the things he’s writing—” She stopped short and stared wildly, as if looking at something behind Lexie’s shoulder. “Do you believe in God?” she concluded with a funny jerk in her voice and a shuddering relaxation of her slim body.

Lexie’s countenance had grown graver and graver while she spoke, and its expression, under his corrugated Claudian brows, more and more sympathetic. But at her final question, flung at him so unexpectedly and recklessly, his very soul seemed to draw back into some interior impregnable fortress, out of the little arrow slits of which he peered forth at her, over moat and portcullis, with a watchful and suspicious cunning.