John Powys - Ducdame

“Come and sit down again,” came in Nell’s faint voice from the corner of the room. It was difficult to decide whether the young girl’s appeal referred to Rook or to her husband, or to both of them. Neither of the men, however, paid the least attention to her.

“What are you laughing at, Netta?” said Rook, standing in front of the unhappy woman and staring at her as if she had been an entire stranger to him.

A complicated expression, difficult to analyze, flitted across her face. There was in it the hunted look of an animal at bay. There was in it a sullen obstinate look, as of a child who is bent on mischief. And in addition to these things there was a curious coarsening process observable there, as if another Netta were dragging and tugging at her consciousness.

“I’ve — got — to — laugh,” she gasped out. “It’s — all — so funny!”

There was a dead silence in the room. Everyone looked at the two of them. Everyone seemed to be conscious, in a sudden suspension of all other interest, that a fatal and epoch-making event was taking place.

Lexie rose from his chair at her side and moved back again to the fireplace.

“What’s so funny? I don’t know what you mean,” said Rook sternly.

His voice seemed to come from such a region of cold, sober detachment that all the company, fuddled a little, as they all were, by the fumes of that silver bowl, experienced an uncomfortable and disturbing shock.

Rook had, as a matter of fact, drunk less than the rest; but, in any case, his tough, phlegmatic nature was not easily affected by liquor.

Netta stopped giggling and pointed at William Hastings, who now sat, gloomy and abstracted, on the sofa.

“He said the mainspring,” she cried huskily. “Yes, you did. You can’t deny it. You said the mainspring!”

Lexie intervened at this point.

“It’s one of his metaphysical symbols, Netta dear. He could easily have said gammon and spinach. It’s what these philosophers always do — use some havering jargon that might mean anything! You’re perfectly right, Netta. It’s the devil’s own silliness.”

“What do you say to that , Hastings?” cried Rook, turning away from the bewildered face in front of him and glaring at the clergyman.

“I leave you to answer your little brother,” retorted the other.

“That’s not fair,” cried Cousin Ann in her rich flute-like voice. “Rook and Lexie are two different people. Aren’t you, Rook? You’re much nearer Mr. Hastings in your ideas. In fact, I’ve heard you say much the same sort of thing; only you never stay in the same mood long and you love contradicting yourself.”

She looked around as if seeking for corroboration of her words. Her eyes caught those of Nell fixed upon her with a sort of frightened wonder.

“You understand what I mean, don’t you, Nell?” she murmured.

“I certainly do,” cried the young girl in eager excitement, Her mouth quivering and her cheeks flushed. “I’ve always known that the real opposite to William was Lexie Ashover and not Rook Ashover.”

Netta’s voice at this point rang out thickly and discordantly.

“Opposite? Opposite? What do you know about Rook? Rook’s a deep one; that’s what Rook is — a deep one; and I’m the one to know it.”

Her tone had that peculiar emphasis in it of a tipsy person who grows quarrelsome.

“I’m not arguing with you, Netta dear,” cried Nell, rising from her seat and then sinking back again with a weary indecision. “I’m not arguing with her, am I, Rook? Perhaps I’m stupid and childish, but I judge things differently than by just the words people say. And you can judge things like that, can’t you, Rook? Judge them by something in the air, I mean?”

She grew self-conscious and embarrassed when she felt the silence round her and the concentrated attention of the whole room. But her embarrassment only drove her on to further self-exposure.

“What I mean is this: There’s something hateful in William — something wicked and cruel — that wants to destroy things. Rook doesn’t want to destroy anything. He only wants to escape, to get away, to let everything go. Things are only half real to Rook; and people, too. They’re real to William; and that’s why he wants to blot them out.”

She stopped, trembling and exhausted, and gazed at Netta like a child begging for shelter and comfort. Netta nodded her head with solemn approbation.

“Half real,” she murmured. “Half real. That’s what it is! Isn’t she clever to have found that out about him? I never could have thought that out for myself.”

Lexie left the fireside where he had been silently listening to all this, and going to the window pulled the curtains back and pushed down the sash.

“Come and look here, Nell,” he said, almost commandingly. The girl cast a quick questioning look at her husband and at Rook and crossed the room to her host’s side.

“Have you ever seen that before?” Lexie said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The whole look of everything,” he replied ambiguously, taking her wrist and making her lean out of the window with him, while Cousin Ann with gestures of exaggerated chilliness threw an antimacassar round her shoulders and moved up close to William Hastings as if to include him in the somewhat perilous intimacy into which the company showed signs of drifting.

Nell was not long in realizing what Lexie meant. By reason of some peculiar thinness in the atmosphere, following upon the precipitation into glittering hoar frost of every particle of vapour, the stars shone down upon the earth with extraordinary brilliance. So brilliant were they, and so large and clear, that the most casual observer, that night, could hardly have failed to be reduced to some kind of amazement. The startling fact that these remote suns were not all of the same simple luminosity but were red and green and orange, and even faintly blue, gave to their appearance a palpable reality, brought their identity home to human senses as a measurable wonder, in a way that could never have happened if they had all of them been just monotonous points of shining whiteness.

But the phenomenon which had struck Lexie and was now holding his companion spellbound was not the fact that the stars were red and orange and blue as well as white; it was the fact that certain atmospheric conditions, connected with the hoar frost, had given to the diffused starlight a quality that properly belonged to moonlight; in other words, had thrown into pallid and phantasmal emphasis objects and distances that were normally obscured by darkness.

“What’s the matter, you two?” called out Rook at last.

“Nothing, my dear,” answered Lexie, pulling the girl back into the room and closing the window.

“Nothing,” echoed William Hastings hoarsely, removing his clasped hands and lifting up his face with an expression like that of an opium-eater returning miserably to normal consciousness.

Netta burst into a peal of plebeian laughter. Her countenance in its convulsed state was not pretty to look upon and Rook after one glance turned away with a shiver of repugnance.

“Nothing — nothing—” gasped Netta at last. “It’s like a game. It’s like hunt-the-slipper. It makes a person laugh.” And once more a peal of merriment more suitable to a Southsea bar-room than to the sedate bookshelves of Lexie’s classical retreat rang through the room.

“Look at Rook’s face!” she gasped out, when her fit subsided. “He’s angry with me. He’s furious at me! And doesn’t it make him look funny?” And she laughed again.

The discordant note had sunk so deeply by this time into the consciousness of them all that an uncomfortable silence filled the room; a silence that was more than a mere negation of sound; a brutal, malignant, positive silence, such as seemed to possess a tangible though an invisible body of its own.