John Powys - Ducdame

She stretched out her arm and extinguished one of the candles which had begun guttering and hissing. She did this quite casually with her finger and thumb; and Netta could not help feeling as if she herself were that quickly despatched flame.

“Heavens, yes!” cried Lady Ann. “I can see you and me now, gossiping round some lovely little fire in Chelsea or Bloomsbury!”

Netta lifted her head at this.

“And the wife, too?” she said, with the shadow of a smile.

Ann received the retort in the spirit of a master fencer taking a well-directed thrust.

“Oh, the wife! Well! not quite that, Netta. Though these silly old embarrassments are fast breaking up. But, no! Not the wife, too, Netta. We’ll leave her to the happy old lady upstairs. And we’ll share Rook between us — as we’re sharing him now.”

The tone in which Cousin Ann spoke of “the wife” was really in the great manner of diplomatic badinage. It pulled Netta across some intimate threshold toward herself and thrust this poor imaginary lady into the outer darkness of conventional unimportance.

“The wife’s affair,” the girl continued, with a richly toned youthful chuckle, “will be to produce little Ashovers! Beyond that there’s no need for any pathetic heroics, I should treat Rook just as I’ve always treated him, if he had a dozen wives!”

Netta looked past Cousin Ann’s flushed cheeks, past the three still burning candles, to the gray square of the one unfrozen mullioned window. The naked boughs of the lime tree outside made a tracery of extraordinary beauty against this pane. And this tracery seemed to be actually reproduced in the mysterious frost marks which covered all the other windows with a lacework filigree.

It was as if that bitter weather had been an old German woodcarver, from Nuremberg or Rothenburg, outlining with his bony knuckles and iron tool a convoluted image of the very platonic “soul” or spiritual “eidolon” of some frost-benumbed growth of the Black Forest.

It was the impression she got from those mysterious frost marks and those knotted twigs, an old buried impression leaping suddenly into life, that created the resignation of her tone in what came next.

“Tell me what to do then — tell me — what to do — and I will do it!”

The words might have come from the clock above the chimneypiece, from the Cavalier’s picture, from the ghost of the tree itself, so stern and faint and impersonal did they sound as they floated over the empty cups and over the charred logs.

Lady Ann heard these words with every sense she possessed. She heard them as a prick-eared fox might have heard the rustle of a plump guinea fowl settling down to sleep in a blackthorn hedge. She heard them with such a thrill of triumph that she rose instinctively to her feet. Whatever may have been the emotion of her great-grandfather when his royal victim capitulated it could hardly have surpassed what she felt just then.

The incredible good luck of this unexpected victory fairly took her breath away.

“You will give up? You will?”

Just for one flickering second there was a vibration in the air about them as if the excited girl were actually going to bend down and kiss her conquered antagonist.

But there must have been something in Netta’s face that nipped in the bud any gesture of that sort.

The woman seemed to be collecting her strength very much as a person who had lost a lot of blood might weakly try to get up from the ground.

“Don’t go yet,” she murmured, misunderstanding Ann’s restlessness. “Don’t go away yet. It isn’t as simple as you think. I must tell you something.”

Cousin Ann moved across to the fireplace and relieved her feelings by striking one of the half-burnt logs a series of violent blows with the poker.

Returning to her seat she flung her plate and cup aside with a gesture more like that of a man than a woman and hurriedly lit another cigarette.

What she craved for at that moment was violent physical exertion. Her thoughts instinctively leaped from one blood-stirring activity to another. She saw the little white “scuts” of vanishing rabbits as she pursued them with her dog. She felt the blue-black ice crack beneath her feet as she skated over the Tollminster mill pond. She felt the kick of the gun against her shoulder as she shot wild duck with her father on Forley Marsh.

She would have liked to put the unhappy and wounded Netta “out of her pain” as she would have done to any other flying creature. She had “brought her down,” But that was no reason why she should not treat her in a sporting manner. She wished she could finish her off as she would a moor hen dragged to her feet by Lion — wring her neck quickly and kindly, and then swing on over the frozen fields!

“Not as simple as I think?” she enquired brusquely. “It seems simple enough to me.”

Netta appeared still to be struggling with a profound interior lassitude, as if out of the channel of some cut vein her blood was making a crimson pool on the floor. She uttered a little clicking sound in her throat. Then she spoke, exaggerating the genteel pronunciation of the words, as if what would really have relieved her feelings would have been to talk like a Portsmouth barmaid.

“One finds it difficult sometimes to make a person agree, you know, to accept one’s decision. I have suggested the very thing you are now saying. I have begged Rook to take a room for me in Tollminster or Bristol. I have begged him not to let me be a drag on his life. I have told him I would perfectly understand his marrying; that I thought he ought to marry. I have said all those things to him, Lady Ann.”

Ann’s gray eyes scrutinized her coldly and critically.

“I expect you told him that you would not accept a penny from him after you left here and after he was married?”

Netta stared in surprise. How did this girl know that?

“Yes,” she answered, “that was just what I did say.”

A smile of malicious subtlety crossed Ann’s, beautiful lips. “And while you said it, of course, you knew that just that very thing would effectively stop him?”

The frowning bewilderment on Netta’s face indicated without the defence of words her freedom from such elaborate guile.

But Cousin Ann went on: “I daresay it was all unconscious, the line you took. But I’m afraid we’re responsible for these shifty moves, even though we don’t realize it when we make them.”

She was silent for a moment, tapping the table with her cigarette case.

“Damn it all!” she burst out at last. “You must pull yourself together, Netta, and make him realize you’re serious. This offering to live without help, this offering to just disappear is only putting spokes in your own wheel. Of course he won’t let you go off like that! What decent man could? When you take that line you leave him no alternative.”

Netta’s face showed quite clearly that this argument had gone through her like a sword.

“I thought—” she began; but even as she spoke the deadly implication of all that this meant stopped her words in mid-utterance. She sat staring at Cousin Ann with her mouth open.

That young lady’s earliest playmate had been her father’s gamekeeper. Missy Sparrow-hawk the old man used to call her. Certainly no raptorial hoverer over the wintry fields knew better the exact moment wherein to drop from the sky.

“One has to face the means to a thing when one wants a thing,” said Cousin Ann. “You and I both care, I take it, for Rook’s happiness above everything else. And Rook’s real happiness, whatever he may say, is in carrying out his destiny. And his destiny, Netta, is in playing his part in life as his people have played it before him.”