John Powys - Ducdame

The fire on the hearth was almost extinct; the great silver punch bowl was empty; most of the candles had guttered down till nothing but flimsy blue flames hovered like shapeless astral lights over the prostrate wicks and liquid grease.

The window curtains had been left open; and Lexie Ashover, who alone of them all retained his habitual alertness, was aware of the contrast between that shining galaxy of many-coloured worlds out there and these abashed, disordered representatives of the race who had dared to divide the universal flux, the motions of those immense orbits, into days and weeks and months and years.

He moved the empty bowl from the centre of the room and replaced it by a vase containing some sprigs of untimely born yellow jasmine that had, without rule or reason and by the haphazard of accident alone, started budding under his eaves.

It had pleased him to see these wayward children of life and chance, and he bent over them now and smelt them as if to draw from their unfrustratable sap encouragement and strength for himself.

Cousin Ann, seeing him thus employed, threw off the antimacassar from her neck and moved up to his side.

Rook had resumed his original place by Nell in the corner of the room, but he was not speaking to her; in fact, he seemed unconscious of her presence. He was staring in front of him with the expression of one who, in place of a vague undetermined future, finds himself suddenly confronted by the hooked horns of an implacable dilemma.

A mysterious flickering smile kept crossing the lips of Cousin Ann as she stood by Lexie’s table, caressing the jasmine buds with her fingers and murmuring little mischievous nothings. She felt at that moment & sudden wave of exultant assurance, beyond all rational scrutiny, that she was already upon the path of becoming the mother of Rook’s child.

Woman-like, she could glance at him now, as he sat scowling and abstracted by Nell’s side, with a furtive possessive triumph in her eyes which was tolerant of everything! She had won in the life-and-death struggle between them! She held all the court cards — every one of them — in her firm hands, and the trump cards as well. She looked at Netta, who had begun to show signs of falling asleep. Strangely enough, instead of feeling remorse for the evil suggestion that had begun this business, and instead of feeling any admiration for the exalted heroism that underlay this pitiful dégringolade , she began actually to share Rook’s ignorant repugnance, justifying to herself her betrayal of Netta on the ground that under the influence of drink the woman’s real character displayed itself in its true colours.

Netta’s appearance, as she began to give up struggling against the approach of what was really a drunken sleep, was certainly calculated to shock any sensitive nerves. Her hair was disordered, her dress ruffled, her forehead beaded with perspiration, and she kept pulling up her legs into her armchair and rearranging her petticoats with that maudlin air of exaggerated sex-consciousness which, of all things, is the most jarring and offensive to women.

“Oh, it’s been a huge success, your party!” murmured Cousin Ann. “Don’t you feel that yourself, my dear?”

Lexie looked at her sardonically and even went so far as to put out the tip of his tongue.

“Well? Hasn’t it?” she continued, sweeping aside his humorous grimace.

The young man shrugged his shoulders. “We shan’t know whether it’s been a success or not until the year is over.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” she laughed. “Well, I’ve a strong presentiment it’ll prove a success to you! ”

The lower part of Lexie’s face, the heavy Claudian contours of his cheeks and chin, stiffened, at her personal allusion, into panic-stricken apprehension. He positively pinched her arm in his agitation.

“Ann! How can you say such things? Don’t you know that to talk of the luck of the year after twelve o’clock is the height of dangerous folly?”

Lady Ann was absolutely nonplussed as to whether she had committed a real faux pas or whether Lexie was fooling. His beautifully moulded lips, as classical as her own, did actually display vexation; but directly she met his eyes they seemed to be mocking her with a mischievous and reckless raillery. He changed the emphasis of her attention before she had solved this mystery.

“There isn’t a person in this room, Ann, except you and me, whose soul has not been reduced to something pallid and drivelling by this party! I oughtn’t to have put so much gin into the punch. Mrs. Bellamy was all for more rum and less gin. But I’ve always had a penchant for that turpentin-ish, bark-like taste, like the style of Dean Swift.”

Cousin Ann looked round the room, and it really did seem to her as if the place were full of woebegone, abject wraiths — wraiths that floated, like stiff corpses, in front of the brains that had begotten them. At the end of any long entertainment between the same four walls there is something of this effect, with the forlornness of which the very furniture seems to conspire; as if the chaos in human brains had the power of ruffling the natural decorum of the inanimate and reducing it to a lamentable simulacrum of its own littered wretchedness.

The girl got no comfort from looking at the cold glittering sky through the uncurtained window. There certainly was something that night not only remote but actually unsympathetic about those points of fire.

She had put out her hand again and touched the yellow buds. She felt at that moment isolated from the rest of the world; menaced and threatened by a thousand perils. Nothing was clear to her as to the significance of this sorry end of a pleasant party; but she felt as if something hostile to the very essence of her happiness was abroad in that room. Cousin Ann did not often let her imagination run away with her; but at this moment, while she contemplated the inert misery that had fallen upon that group of people; when she saw the ungraceful sleep of Netta, the exposed infatuation of Nell, the morose lethargy of Rook, the suppressed malice of Hastings; she felt as if the place were a sort of hospital ward over which the high stars twinkled like the brilliant electric bulbs over an operating table.

She was just on the point of opening her lips to suggest their return home when, with a shock that made them all stare bewilderedly at each other, the door bell rang violently.

“What’s that?” cried Rook, leaping to the window and leaning out. “Who’s there?” he called, for the intruder was concealed by the porch.

“Mrs. Bellamy has gone to bed long ago,” said Lexie. “Do you mind running down and seeing who it is, Rook?”

“I’ll go,” cried William Hastings who happened to be nearest the door.

As he went down there was an intense moment of expectancy. Even Netta, who had been waked from sleep, realized that there was something serious in the air.

Nell was visibly trembling. “I feel,” she whispered to Rook, “as if a goose were walking over my grave.”

They could all hear the door opened and shut, the sound being followed by the tones of a man’s voice talking in a low, hurried murmur. Then there was the creaking of a hall chair as Hastings made the messenger sit down, and almost immediately the clergyman reappeared.

“It’s Drool, from Antiger Lane,” he said gravely. “Mr. Richard Ashover died two hours ago.”

MORE than three months had passed over the precincts of Ashover, and before this space of time had elapsed the greatest transfiguration possible to the life of the earth was already growing visible and audible. The passing of autumn into winter, for all its stark relief of bare branches and frozen hills, has nothing comparable to this miraculous reversion, taking place in the heart of the vegetable world, heralded from the yellow bills of blackbirds and from the throats of wind-tossed missel thrushes mating in the high trees.