John Powys - Ducdame

And Rook Ashover hated the day. He felt a queer, nervous, reluctant uneasiness even about meeting Nell. He would have given anything for a hard, nipping black frost to get its grip upon these misty meadows, to turn all this clinging earth-flesh into frozen rock! He loathed the sodden, relaxed clay with its incense-reek of insidious mortality. He longed to escape from it all, into some clear, purged, bitter air. He felt homesick for the tang of the salt, unharvested, unfecund sea.

Blindly striding across the meadows — full of whirling, contradictory thoughts — he was suddenly brought to a standstill by a wide black ditch.

“Double-dyed ass! Of course there’s no path over these cursed fens!”

He walked along the edge of the ditch, looking for a plank or a dam by which to cross.

No plank! No dam! Only another black ditch still wider than the one he was following!

He had a queer horrid moment; caught there, by those two black ditches. The reeds had been dead and rotten for some time and their brown stalks stood up like twisted feathers from some obscene bird’s skull whose skeleton was mud-engulfed. One ditch was full of dead willow leaves. The other had a dead alder branch floating on its surface. And from both of them there emerged a heavy thick acrid odour that seemed as if it must be the very final exhalation of the dead flesh of a world.

Turning his heel in an angry desperation he caught sight of a human figure emerging from the shadow of the church and moving hesitatingly among the graves.

His heart, in spite of himself, began to beat violently. She was earlier than he had expected!

Had there been some new trouble with that mad priest?

Well! Never mind the reason. She was there. And he quickened his steps to something approaching a run, fearful that she might take fright when she saw him and out of some crazy perversity elude him and vanish.

She gave no sign of retreating, however. She just remained passive — leaning against a tombstone; waiting for him. He scrambled over the low wall and strode straight up to her, holding his hat in his hand.

“I knew it was you,” she said simply; and made room for him at her side; so that he could lean also against the monument to “Timothy Edward Foraker, yeoman of this Parish.”

“I knew it was you,” she repeated, letting her fingers remain clasped in his as they stared together across the misty expanse.

Rook did not speak a word to her for several minutes. His soul seemed divided into three separate beings. One of these beings was obsessed with a simple concentrated desire to get hold of the inmost fluttering identity of this passive creature. To get hold of that — to take it for his own — to make it his unresisting, helpless, abandoned possession.

Another being in him was full of nervous considerations that were tremulous with a thousand fears, like the quivering antennæ of moths, the agitated feelers of sea anemones, the twitching nostrils of horses; considerations that included Netta, Cousin Ann, his mother — Nell herself.

But the third being in him just looked on, with absolute detachment and indifference, at the whole turbid stream of his life. It hovered over both their heads, this third being, and over the gravestone of Timothy Edward against which they leaned. It hovered over the ragged, mournful trunk of Lexie’s elm tree. It voyaged out over the misty fens, over the gates and dams and poplars and ditches — over the rim of the horizon. And it was already out of its body, this third being, out of its malice-ridden, nerve-jangled body, drinking with deep, thirsty draughts the great calm under lake of hateless, loveless oblivion!

His first words to her came from the second being in him, the one with the twitching nostrils of a nervous animal. “Why did you come earlier than you said? It’s only beginning to get dark now.”

Even while he spoke, the first being in him was clutching her thin fingers more tightly, possessing itself of them more unscrupulously.

“Why didn’t I wait?” she murmured. “It wasn’t because I was in such a desperate hurry that I couldn’t wait, Rook. Was that what you were thinking?” And she turned her head toward him with a faint little-girl smile, answering the pressure of his fingers.

“No, Rook dear,” she went on. “It was because he is after all going to have vespers to-night. He told me yesterday he wasn’t; that he had something else to do; and that’s why I said to you to come to-night. But he is. So I came early; on the chance. I shall have to wait for him here,” she added. “He likes me to be in the church.”

Rook cast a slow, cautious glance toward the corner of the building. “But we’ve got a long time before vespers, haven’t we?” he said.

“About an hour, I should think.” And she, too, cast an anxious glance in the direction of the village. “Well, nearly an hour, anyway; but you’ll go when I tell you, Rook, won’t you? Sometimes I like to have you near me when I meet him. But not to-day. Oh, Rook! I saw Lexie this morning and he’s worrying about himself. He says this damp weather’ll kill him if it goes on. I thought he looked rather better, if anything. But he’s worrying.”

Rook dropped her hand and stood up. “Damn! I must go and see him,” he said. “I haven’t seen him for three days. I’ll go straight over there to-night.”

The girl got up, too. She felt only softly and gently sorry for Lexie. There was a queer exaltation in her that made it difficult to be more sorry than that for any one.

“He’ll outlive us all,” she said. “His mania for life is like the jump of that salmon trout I saw at Tollminster Mill. I told you about it. It jumped over the edge of the boat. It jumped over everything. And it got back, too, into the mill pond.”

For some reason or other it gave Nell a peculiar satisfaction to think of Lexie as a silvery salmon jumping for his life. She felt that she would like to hold that struggling, arrowy, smooth-scaled fish tightly in her hand before seeing it go splashing back.

She became quiet and still, thinking of Lexie in this way; but in the end she wanted to stop thinking of him; for she suddenly recalled the particular look in the eyes of the animal in her childhood’s Bible, entitled: “The Ram caught by its Horns.” No fish, even with hooked gills, even with the tragic eye-sockets of the Dolphins of Scopas, could ever feel quite what that beast felt; and if a man felt more—

She found herself being led by Rook to the door of the church. The sun had been invisible for some time past; and now the whole scene was losing its distinctness, losing its familiar landmarks one by one as the night fell.

Gloom that drew its quality from dampness, a positive thing, was rapidly being replaced by gloom that drew its quality from darkness, a negative thing.

Rook pushed open the door of the church and drew her inside. It was like night within the building, a night that was faintly touched by a pallid greenish luminousness that seemed to have no connection with sun or moon.

As the heavy door closed behind them the girl felt she had passed into a different world, a world smelling of some sort of chilly-fleshed fungous growths that had taken centuries to mature.

Rook took her by the hand and led her up the narrow aisle, past the brass lectern, under the Norman archway, to where the tombs of the Ashovers of old days lay in their pallid immobility. Standing behind her, while her knees touched the sleeping Crusader, he took her in his arms and kissed her cold cheek. Letting her head sink back and turning her face sideways she met his lips, while her slender body yielded itself to him.

She felt strangely and profoundly happy in his embrace. It was a different kind of happiness altogether from what she felt when Lexie kissed her on the day she had fled from her home. She had had Rook on her mind then, so that she could not lie back content upon the dark flood; but it was Rook himself whose desire was that flood now, and her whole nature was free to respond.