John Powys: Ducdame

“How long will you give me, Auntie, to try out my method?” she asked, holding up her teacup and smiling, with the conquering smile of youth, at her companion.

“How long, my dear child? Goodness! I give you as long as you like! What else can I do? Nothing that I can say to the poor boy seems to make the least difference.”

As the old woman uttered these words she thought within her heart: “Can’t I make this proud creature see what our only chance is? Can’t I make her see that our only chance is nothing else than her own reckless, unscrupulous beauty?” And the brutal game-preserving expressions of Corporal Dick, still redolent of rank weed-smoke, thumped and heel-tapped in her obsessed brain.

“She’s been thinking a great deal lately,” went on the younger woman, stretching out her long legs and sliding both hands into her jacket pockets. “She can’t get what I said to her out of her mind. She’s beginning to feel pricks of conscience. There’s no doubt about that. And once get her to feel that sort of thing to a point of spoiling her illusion — well! there we are!”

Mrs. Ashover rose from the sofa and, impatiently pushing the tea table a little farther away, reached for her woolwork. Then sinking back by her companion’s side she turned a querulous, anxious, disturbed face toward her.

“Spoiling her illusion? What are you talking about, child?” She sighed heavily and smoothed the lace cuff of one of her wrists with nervous fingers.

“I believe you have a sort of liking for the baggage!” she burst out.

Lady Ann lifted her eyebrows and regarded her with a mocking, slightly contemptuous smile. The daughter of a long line of courtly diplomatists, she began to feel a little irritated with her aunt. “It’s the Gresham blood in her,” she thought. “They always had a second-rate streak.”

“Well!” she said slowly. “I don’t feel that it’s necessary to quarrel with people. One puts oneself on their level in that way, doesn’t one? I daresay the poor little woman has had a hard enough time of it. If I could give her a good round income; a trim little villa down at Weymouth or somewhere; with a couple of servants and an old enamoured sea captain, shall we say, across the hedge — gracious! I would willingly do it!”

Mrs. Ashover’s countenance expressed the sort of astonishment that she would have felt if Cousin Ann had suddenly kicked one of her neat shoes right across the room.

“You young people are too much for me,” she murmured. “Too much for me. I suppose it’s Rook who has put these ideas into your head,” she added, with a quick glance of stealthy malevolence. “In my time designing minxes like that were not given incomes. They were given the stick!”

Lady Ann leaned forward and laid her strong young hand on the old woman’s knee.

“Do you suppose, Auntie dear, that if I wasn’t sure it would be all right, I should feel as happy as I do to-day?”

Mrs. Ashover’s face cleared a little. There certainly did seem to gleam forth an overpowering confidence and assurance from the girl’s limpid, mysterious gray eyes.

There was a tone of impassioned pleading in the old lady’s voice as she murmured eagerly: “You give me your word? You will save him? You will save him from her?”

Ann Gore dropped her eyelids at this and a smile of deep, sweet, implacable power crossed her mouth, making her full lips, exquisitely childish in their perfect Cupid’s bow, curve so divinely that her aunt leaned over and impulsively kissed her.

“We won’t talk about it any more, child. I understand you. There! I expect you’re wanting to get out now and have your walk. You mustn’t give up the whole of a lovely afternoon to an old troublesome thing like me.”

They both rose to their feet. The air from the open window, treacherous-sweet with the death smell of a world of dying leaves, flowed through them; rousing a poignant response in their deepest nerves.

The wide-stretching unsown plough lands, the patient indrawn leafless woods, the great inert, apathetic breasts of the earth, drew these women toward them in answering reciprocity. To the elder it was as if the strong invisible hands of the dead generations were urging her on, comforting her, sustaining her, in her struggle against her adversary. To the younger it was as if the very spirit of that hibernating countryside, lying fallow, secretive, implacable, were calling to her to share in some tremendous waiting , through rain, through frost, through everything — for the hour of the sowing of the seed.

They stood together for a perceptible space of time, caught, as two people often are, by the very beat of the wings of fate. Then all in a moment they became conscious that they were both listening, intently, absorbingly, to a sound in the garden outside.

It was the sound of a man’s footsteps moving up and down, up and down, with irritating regularity, along the gravel path that ran parallel to the lawn.

They both felt instinctively that the man was Rook; and for that very reason they were each reluctant to go to the window and look out. Rook’s personality had certainly hovered over their tea table, but neither of them was at all anxious for the intrusion of his actual presence at that juncture.

The situation was indeed, for one second, humorously disconcerting; one of those situations with which the clumsy gaucherie of men copes more easily than the finesse of women.

But Lady Ann kept her head, and soon proved herself a true daughter of the diplomatic Lord Poynings.

Without the flicker of an eyelid to indicate that she knew that both of them had heard those steps: “There’s Lion!” she cried. “I’m sure he’s dying for a run on Battlefield. Good-bye, Auntie! I’ve enjoyed my tea so much!”

The door was hardly shut behind her when Mrs. Ashover hurried to the window. There he was — her son the Squire — pacing abstractedly up and down, as if the little gravel path were the wall of a fortress.

Presently she heard the voice of Cousin Ann, a clear careless young girl’s voice, calling: “Lion! Lion! Lion!” Apparently Rook Ashover also heard that voice; for he stopped suddenly in his abstracted walk, stood hesitating for a moment, looking nervously toward the sound; and then with a quick furtive stride and without so much as once glancing behind him, made off in the direction of the Frome bridge.

“Why doesn’t she run after him?” cried the old lady in her indignant heart, tapping the window sill with her knuckles.

“Lion! Lion! Lion!” came the girlish voice from the stable yard.

“You fool! He’s across the bridge! You stupid! He’s across the river!” And the belligerent little woman positively shook the window frame in her impetuous annoyance.

Rook was across the river. He was not only across the river but he was also — very soon — across the churchyard and out into the water meadows behind it. He felt such an intense desire for movement, for action, for self-escape.

No doubt the peculiar quality of that pacing up and down the gravel path had been the outward sign of the rending and tearing within him of two opposite motive forces.

He had made a sort of half-appointment to meet Nell Hastings that afternoon; but something in Netta’s mood, something illuminated, magnetic, had made him feel uneasy and perplexed.

Netta had seemed to escape him as she never had escaped him. She seemed to have acquired some mysterious independence. She had spoken to him and looked at him in such a strange, remote, exultant way! He felt piqued and confused. He found himself half-wishing that he hadn’t made this appointment with Nell.

Rook did not realize how deeply the great goddess Artemis — the mysterious immortal whose love is for her own body — had come into her own that day. He did not realize that it was a day for the triumph of woman’s nerves over man’s nerves. On such a day, he ought to have told himself, had the dangerous thyrsus-bearing son of Semele come stealthily into the city of Pentheus. On such a day had the wild Bassarids and Mænads sent the gory head of Orpheus “down the swift Hebrus, to the Lesbian shore”! On such a day had the dogs and maidens of Diana torn the luckless Actæon limb from limb. It was a woman’s day; a day that lay virginal, inscrutable, relaxed; yet with a magnetism in its inertness that could trouble a man’s deepest soul.