John Powys - Ducdame

Lexie himself seated on a hard-backed chair was reading aloud in a murmuring, chanting voice, from the Oxford Book of English Verse, while Cousin Ann and Mr. Hastings, from opposite ends of the rug-covered sofa, listened to him with an attention that was at once entranced and wandering; the sort of attention that strangers in a foreign temple might offer to an alien liturgy.

Netta, isolated from the rest even more than Cousin Ann was isolated from Mr. Hastings, sat in Lexie’s especial armchair watching Rook and Nell with an inscrutable smile.

Every now and then, unnoticed by any of the others except Lady Ann, she moved across to the table and replenished her glass from the deep nutmeg-scented bowl, whose silvery depths seemed as misty as her own cloudy thoughts.

By degrees the intent look with which she regarded her protector and his young companion changed its character. Her fixed mysterious smile degenerated into a fatuous stare and that again into an expression which resembled the ostentatious restraint of a burst of silly giggling.

The clock on the mantelpiece had now reached a point indicative of there being only fifteen minutes left of the year that was sinking into the gulf.

Lexie was reading Shakespeare’s “The Phœnix and the Turtle.” One by one the richly cadenced quatrains of the mysterious poem, thrown into a solemn relief by the unction of his voice, accompanied by the slow swaying of his heavy head as the music of the words took possession of him, even as the Delphic vapours were wont to intoxicate the Oracular priestess, fell grandly and fatally upon the rushing surface of that tidal ebb of the river of time, so soon to be swallowed up:

Let the bird of loudest lay

On the sole Arabian tree

Herald sad and trumpet be,

To whose sound chaste wings obey.

…….

Here the anthem doth commence —

Love and constancy is dead;

Phœnix and the turtle fled

In a mutual flame from hence.

…….

So they loved, as love in twain

Had the essence but in one;

Two distincts, division none;

Number there in love was slain.

Like the corpses of royal children, slain in some religious holocaust, wrapped up in cerements of gold, the slow, gnomic, litany-sad syllables, murmured in Lexie’s deep hieratic voice, sank down into that flowing stream and disappeared for ever.

What planetary mystery, beyond the death dirge of human love, beyond the annihilation of human faith, had the great poet in his mind as he composed these extraordinary strophes?

The clock on the mantelpiece had reached the point of three minutes to midnight now; and though Nell’s low eager voice talking to Rook had not ceased, one could note that it kept breaking and hesitating, as if the girl has been spiritually aware, without being mentally conscious, that the death and birth of time itself were interchanging their unfathomable secrets above her head.

The poet’s stanzas seemed actually to be trailing their black and golden vestments to the measure of “a defunctive music” whose full significance was deeper, wider, more beautiful, more tragic, than anything that was passing between those four walls.

Before the two hands of the clock had come together under the sign of twelve, Lexie had reached the “Threnos” of this mysterious Shakespearean psalmody:

Death is now the phœnix’ nest

And the turtle’s loyal breast

To eternity doth rest,

Leaving no posterity:

’Twas not their infirmity,

It was married chastity.

Directly the clock began to strike they all lifted their eyes and remained motionless, staring at one another. There was a hush in the room when the thin reverberation died away, out of the heart of which it almost seemed as if they could hear the death rattle of some enormous winged creature, some huge space-moth, whose soft-feathered body was even then crumpling up, contorted and rigid, to sink down into the pools of Nothingness, a vast, lamentable, empty husk!

It was William Hastings who broke the silence.

“It’s curious to think,” he said, “that Time is a mere human invention, a mere illusion, without reality or substance beyond the fantastic and arbitrary interference of man.”

“Nonsense!” broke in Rook. “Time moves at a different rate for different types of consciousness. But it isn’t an illusion. It’s the very essence of reality! It pours forth, like the water of life, from every shape and form into which Space is divided. You can’t think of Space without Time, but sometimes I almost feel as if I could think of Time without Space.”

“How do you think of Time, Rook?” enquired Lexie, anxious as he always was to encourage his taciturn brother to express himself.

“I think of it as a great gray Serpent, perpetually uncoiling itself from a pile of coils that has no end and no beginning.”

“You mean that it always comes round again, having swallowed its tail?” said Nell with a little self-conscious, youthful laugh at her own audacity.

“No, no — I don’t mean that at all. I mean that it just uncoils itself and goes off into darkness; scale after scale of gray silveriness; and then lost to sight! I can see those coils uncurling their endless length independently of Space altogether.”

William Hastings looked at him with the Weary indifference with which professional philosophers regard the utterances of ordinary persons.

“You can’t see anything without using both the great illusions, Ashover,” he remarked drily. “But I sympathize with you in your condemnation of Space. Space has too much in it. But then, so has your Time! The whole business has gone too wide and far. The hour has struck for striking a blow at these miserable illusions, at this disgusting spectacle!”

He rose from the sofa as he spoke and began walking up and down the room. Lexie, who had been watching the face of Netta with a certain anxiety, left the mantelpiece and drew up a chair by her side, slipping his hand into hers as if to establish between them a warm human barrier against these desolate speculations. “I tell you,” went on Hastings, “the time has come to unwind the clock, to unravel the woof!”

“Mr. Hastings has some very interesting thoughts,” said Cousin Ann, clipping her words like a youthful undergraduate anxious to prove his sobriety.

“Netta and I don’t know what the devil he’s talking about, do we, Netta?” put in Lexie. Netta made no answer. With a blank fatuous smile and wavering steps she moved across to the punch bowl and refilled her glass.

When she had reseated herself, Lexie once more possessed himself of her hand. He did this with a grave protective gesture while his corrugated, seamed, and leathery countenance, full of a formidable Cæsarean dignity, turned toward the excited ecclesiastic a quizzical and hostile eye.

“You mean, I suppose,” said Rook, filling his own glass again, while Nell watched him from her corner with big, infatuated eyes, “that your thoughts have hurt themselves against the ultimate walls; and you want a world without walls? You’d better wait for death, Hastings. That’s simpler than trying to change the universe.”

William Hastings paused in his monotonous walk and drummed with one of his hands on the table.

“Death is no good!” he shouted. “What we want is to stop death from breeding life! What we have to do is to go behind both life and death and get our hands on the mainspring.”

Netta began to laugh at this, an unpleasant tipsy laugh that drew Rook’s attention to her for the first time that night.

“What’s the matter, Netta?” he said brusquely. “Let her alone, Lexie.”

Netta’s laugh died away in a series of suppressed giggles.

“Let her alone yourself,” replied the younger Ashover, glancing almost angrily at his brother.