John Powys - Ducdame

The old man heard him to the end. Then with a stiff mechanical jerk he got up, straightened his shoulders to their full height, took his stick and hat and muffler from the table, and strode resolutely to the door.

“This is all I’m to get from you, then?” said he in a husky voice. “I’m an old man and a poor man; but this house and this family are more precious to me than my own life. You think I’m an old fool. Don’t ’ee be too sure, Nephew; don’t ’ee be too sure! There be some as can endure to see their hopes frustrated; and there be some as can’t and won’t. When a man’s my age and has nothing to live for and nothing to fear, he’s dangerous —that’s what he is; he’s dangerous! He’s like a fox that’s been half-skinned in a trap. He goes slow and he goes round; but he gets his goose in the end!”

Rook had risen to his feet and was standing with his body bent forward and his fingertips resting on the table. He might have been a bewildered parliamentarian watching the intrusion of some reckless bomb-thrower. He wished he had taken a different line with the old fanatic; been conciliatory, prevaricating, indefinite. Nothing more annoying than this could possibly have occurred — annoying and sinister. The old man’s vague and obscure menaces were just the kind most of all calculated to worry a man’s mind. The wildest, queerest thoughts whirled through Rook’s brain as he watched his uncle turn round upon him once more, his hand on the door handle.

“You think because you were born legitimate-like and be Squire of Ashover and stand where your father stood and where my father stood, that you can do as you please. Do you know this place as I know it? Do you hear the voices of dead folks calling to you out of their graves? Do you see things in the woods, in the lanes, in the bartons, as I do? Things that do walk and wail o’ nights, ’cause the Lord won’t let un lie still? Hark to the wind now, young man, hark to the wind now! It’s contrary to nature for the wind to talk to a man, but ’a do talk; I’ve a-heard un; day in, day out; and ’a do say such things as would turn a man’s wits if he didn’t know north from south in every copse and spinny o’ Frome-side. But go your ways, Rook Ashover, go your ways! Drive our dead folks back where they belong! Be the black plague to your sacred mother! I’ve a-said my say and I be going. But I’ve not finished with this little job yet!”

To Rook’s final astonishment before he disappeared into the hallway the extraordinary old man gave him a second portentous wink, the effect of which upon the aged face that made it was bizarre in the extreme. It was as if a judge, wearing the black cap, had suddenly put out his tongue at the condemned.

The agitated silence which followed the departure of Uncle Dick was interrupted by the familiar sound of Pandie ringing the hall bell as a signal for lunch. The noise made Rook think of the days when he and Lexie used to bolt up to their bedroom at the end of the passage to wash themselves clean of fish scales and river slime.

Oh, Lexie, Lexie … Ay! He would be content to go over the whole wretched business of his life again if only he could give his brother ten good years more of the existence he loved so well!

DECEMBER had come; and with the coming of December there fell upon that country of pastures and orchards a warm trance-like stillness.

The earth seemed to lie back upon itself, relaxed and lethargic. The days slid by imperceptibly, each one resembling the one before it, in a heavy, damp, windless atmosphere, steamy and misty, with large sun-warmed, earth-brown noons followed by amber-coloured twilights.

On one of these rich mellow placid days, imperturbable and languid as a woman in bed with her first-born, Mrs. Ashover and Lady Ann sat in the former’s luxurious room, enjoying afternoon tea.

Any one who could have peered into this privileged chamber would have displayed little surprise at learning that its occupant preferred to have all her meals brought up to her there.

The place was really an almost flawless work of art. It had the qualities of a drawing room and yet it was more delicate, more dainty, more personal, than any drawing room Lady Ann had ever seen.

Mrs. Ashover had a fire in the grate, but it was so warm that she had opened one of the windows, and the rich earth-heavy smell of ploughed furrows and mud-muffled lanes came floating in and hovered over the delicate bric-à-brac and over the Queen Anne chairs and tables.

It was perhaps because of the millions and millions of dead leaves that were dissolving back into the flesh of their great drowsy mother that, with this air from the woods and meadows, there came a perceptible savour, acrid and penetrating, of the very sweat of death itself.

It was the sort of day that has an especial appeal to the nerves of women, perhaps because the passivity, the inertness, the lethargy of the earth at these times, its preparturient fallowness , moribund and yet magnetic, self-absorbed and yet germinative, has something in it that answers to one of their own most profound and secret moods.

The land, thus lying fallow and immobile, might be said to have sunk down, to have sunk back, into some interior level or stratum of being, where it was unapproachable to the sun’s generative warmth, and yet had a mysterious life of its own.

Hardly conscious of the systole and diastole of its faint breath, of the subterranean beating of its muffled pulses, the vast rain-soaked countryside seemed, during this placid winter solstice, to be in some mysterious way enjoying the ecstasy of its own virginal languor, of its own deep peace, as a “still unravished bride of quietness.”

Something of this appeasement, of this self-amorous quiescence, must have floated in through that open window, must have worked its relaxing charm upon the old woman and the young woman, as they sat on the sofa side by side, their skirts touching, the supple athletic wrist in its tweed sleeve, the slender aged wrist in its lace sleeve, hovering over the little rosewood tea table, over the polished silver, over the Meissen china.

The influence of the day, the immense languid emanation that diffused itself through the room, endowed with a vague but very formidable power the subtle conspiracy, evasive, ambiguous, which rose like the scent of a sweet but poisonous flower from their intimate conversation.

“She is thinking over what I said,” threw out Lady Ann, helping herself to another piece of thin bread and butter and lifting it to her finely curved mouth with the impetuousness of a greedy child.

“But what good will that do us?” murmured the old woman, flicking an errant tea leaf from the edge of her cup as if she would dispose of their enemy in the same more effective, more drastic way.

“No thinking that she does will take her off, switch her back to Bristol, or wherever it is he picked her up. That’s what I feel about all this roundabout method of yours. It just doesn’t get us anywhere! I told you from the beginning that the way you treated her would only give her a false impression; only make her settle down more snugly than ever in her warm nest. And now by giving her a jolt you’ve only made her suspicious of you. You haven’t changed her. How could you change her? Why should she change?”

Lady Ann swallowed her bread and butter and stretched out her hand for another piece. She felt very hungry and for some occult reason very formidable. She moved her supple body inside her closely fitting clothes with a slow feline movement of muscular relaxation. “I’ll go for a long walk after tea. I’ll take Lion,” she said to herself. And her mind visualized the enormous Newfoundland dog bounding over the gorse bushes and sniffing at the rabbit burrows. Between herself and this dog of Rook’s a close attachment had sprung up. She had been shocked to find how little Rook cared for it. People who didn’t understand dogs oughtn’t to have dogs! They either neglected them heartlessly, or they corrupted them by ill-timed petting.