John Powys - Ducdame

There was her white figure standing in full candlelight against the small square panes!

Had she also heard the sound? Rook never knew. To her — for some subconscious reason — he always kept complete silence upon that mystery.

Whether she was even aware that he had gone out he never knew, any more than he knew whether the gamekeeper and his wife were conscious or unconscious of his nocturnal movements.

He did not stand there for long. He could see her turn away from the window and blow out her candle, and that single natural gesture, more than all the other forces that were combining against him, stiffened the nerves of his resolution.

Back to the door and up the creaking steps, and once more he was in Corporal Dick’s room!

The old man had apparently slept without any change of position.

Rook rapidly undressed, and putting on his overcoat as a dressing gown, lit a cigarette at the fire, using a torn letter from his pocket to transport the necessary flame.

He smiled to himself to see how his hand shook as he did this.

With hurried indrawing breaths he smoked about half of the cigarette, leaning against the mantelpiece. Then, throwing the rest of it on the coals, he moved to the door and went out into the passage.

As he left the room he heard the old man muttering in his sleep. He waited breathlessly for a moment, his hand on the door-knob.

“Die out? Never — never — I’ll shoot the bitch like a rabbit first!”

The words were followed by an inarticulate moan and that again by dead silence. Rook left the Corporal’s door open and moved silently across the landing.

Without knocking he turned the handle of the door opposite. It opened easily, and entering with a beating heart he left it ajar behind him.

The old man at least deserved that much consideration from the head of the family he had done so much to keep alive upon the earth!

IT WAS the morning of the last day of the year. Characteristic of so many winter days in Dorset the weather was neither warm nor cold nor wet nor dry. It was Laodicean weather, born, like the English Prayer Book, of a genius for compromise. If such weather had had a human soul, it would have been condemned by Dante as being “neither for God nor for His enemies”!

The sun was not sufficiently strong to throw a single shadow or to illumine a single blade of grass; and yet one could see its form up there behind filmy vapours, faint, wistful, like a pallid, age-worn coin, weak as the eye of a dying lion, at which any mongrel cur may bark.

After a breakfast with Netta and his cousin as neutral and colourless as was the sky outside, Rook was buttoning up his gaiters in the kitchen, his foot on a chair, when Pandie approached him with a look of gloating importance. No archaic herald carrying solemn messages from one monarch to another could have displayed, more unctuous gravity than did this exile “from the banks of the Tone” in conveying to Rook the news that he was wanted by his mother.

As soon as his back was turned Pandie hurried to the elbow of Martha Vabbin and began eagerly speaking.

“Twasn’t what the missus spoke aloud that made I know ’twere going to be bad for Squire; ’twere what Missus keepit locked up in her own besom. Missus be terrible sore about this fancy party for year’s end what Master Lexie have prejicted for all o’n. She do want Squire to stay with she, decent and quiet-like, and not go hobby-horsing to brother’s where there be no one to put cork in bottle save Gammer Bellamy, thik old trot!”

Martha Vabbin turned a large impassive face toward her excited colleague.

“Thee and me won’t have nothink to complain of, woman, if folks be down village. Missus won’t want more than her usual; and us can have Martin Pod up-along, same as us did five years agone, when them all was in London; only please God ’a won’t have his rheumatics on him, the poor crotchety man!”

Pandie was unimpressed by the prospect of entertaining the cantankerous sexton. She retained her dramatic manner.

“Did ’ee see how much of thik brandy someone have drunk these last days? If someone do drink to-night like what she’s a been drinking lately, up there by her lone self, Squire’ll have to carry her home piggy-back, same as old Squire carried Nancy Cooper home the night of the eclipse.”

Martha Vabbin tossed a bowlful of peeled potatoes into a pot of clean water and resettled the lid of another pot out of which came a fragrant steam.

“I can’t see who’s to object to a body having a nip between meals, even if she be living with a gentleman. Since Christmas, when she came in here and laid, side of my plate, that pearl and pansy brooch, I’ve ’a had a Christian forbearance for the poor sinner. What you wants to be, Pandie, is more ’vangelical, same as I. Fornication ain’t the only thorn in the blessed Lord’s flesh. This speaking evil of them that’s soft as lambs be a terrible sharp prick for the dear Immanuel; which is to say ‘God with us.’”

Pandie turned away and moved irritably toward the pantry. She knew too well what to expect when Mrs. Vabbin’s voice assumed a certain pious tone, redolent of prayer meetings. “ I won’t be the one to give that Pod anythink to drink,” she said to herself. “He do make Martha as high-falutin as ’isself.”

The master of the house found his mother in a state of unusual tension. She had had a series of agitating interviews with Cousin Ann since the affair of the shooting and she had found the younger woman mysteriously reserved and unsympathetic.

“So I’m to be left alone to-night, Rook, it seems,” she began, without rising from her armchair or lifting her eyes from her knitting.

The son did not risk a rebuff by attempting to kiss her. He shut the door and stood with his back to the fire, glancing round at the warm intimacies of the room.

“I don’t see why Lexie should have a lonely New Year any more than you, Mother,” he said slowly. “It’s your own attitude you must blame and nobody else’s.”

The old lady sighed. “I don’t blame anybody,” she said querulously. “I’m past blaming anybody. I thought when you brought that woman here that things could not be worse. But they are worse. How you can find it in you to go on like this is beyond my comprehension. I only hope your dear father is protected from knowing what I’ve gone through. That’s what puzzles me most of all, Rook; that you can bear to think of him looking down at us at this moment and seeing—”

“Stop, for God’s sake, Mother; stop!”

She did stop and with trembling fingers unravelled several inches of her work.

“When you talk like that about my father ‘looking down at us’ it makes me feel absolutely sick! Aren’t you ashamed of such plebeian sentimentality? It makes me feel as if Cousin Ann were right when she says that there’s a streak of common blood in you, Mother. How can you say things like that? ‘Looking down at us!’ It’s a disgusting phrase; worthy of a nonconformist minister; worthy of Martin Pod!”

The old lady met his angry look quite fearlessly, though there was more unravelling of woollen threads in her black-silk lap.

Then the corners of her eyes and mouth began to wrinkle, and a smile that might have been called mischievous flickered across her face.

“Never mind about your father, then,” she said. “You’re a true Ashover, Rook, whatever Cousin Ann thinks of me! Come here, you troublesome boy, and give your old mother a kiss.”

He went across to her and bent down.

“That’s better,” she said as he returned to the hearth. “Oh, Rook, Rook, if you could only once see things as they are. But there! I don’t believe you men live in the same world as we do. I believe you all move about in some crazy unreality of your own fancy. Sometimes I wonder if you’re not all a little bit mad! I teased you just now about your father. But, oh, dear! your father was just the same. Listen, Rook! Have I ever told you about his affair with Nancy Cooper the gipsy? No? But of course you’ve heard of it. You men always hear of those things. It’s probably been tavern gossip for years and years! It was a New Year’s night when he broke with her; found her in the arms of a tramp or something and never spoke to her again. He was easily shocked, was my poor dear John. And when once a thing was over, it was over!”