John Powys - Ducdame

But what a travesty, what a farcical travesty of the first romance of a man’s life was the figure he found seated by that pleasant window! Netta sat there in her shift. Her hair, banging loose and disordered on each side of her head, betrayed only too many gray streaks in its untidy brown masses; while her right arm, falling limp and inert to the floor‚ still held in its feeble clutch one of those small glass bottles of French brandy for which the Ashover cellar had formerly been famous!

Her face was flushed and not agreeably flushed‚ the lines in it being drawn tightly and harshly underneath the skin‚ while the skin itself was that of a person marked and sealed as belonging pitifully to a nature divested of the natural instincts of human self-respect.

Rook closed the door behind him and turned the lock. “The servants have known this for a long time,” he thought to himself.

He crossed the room and stood by her side. Her breath‚ heavy with liquor, spoiled the scent of that divine air, which floated in upon him as if over thousands of leagues of newly sprouting grass.

He shook her by the shoulder; not roughly but quite without tenderness, for his heart at that moment felt dead within him beneath all the futilities of human existence.

She opened her eyes and stared at him wildly, appearing hardly conscious at first as to where she was. Then, with a natural impulse of concealment, as if — thought Rook bitterly — he had been a policeman in a raid, she pushed the bottle under her chair and made a pitiful movement to adjust her attire to the requirements of conventional modesty.

“So this is how you amuse yourself‚” he said. “Perhaps you’d like me to hand you your dressing gown?” he added, with a sarcasm in his tone which was as completely lost upon her as if it had been addressed to the lime tree in the garden.

She took the dressing gown he brought her and, holding out her arms as if she had been a doll, passively allowed him to help her into it. Then she rose unsteadily to her feet, clutching the folds of the garment against her breast with one hand and gathering up her hair with the other.

“Well?” he said in a low bitter tone.

She let her hair fall down again and put out her hand toward him with a helpless, deprecating gesture.

“Don’t you love me at all, Rook?” she murmured huskily.

He disregarded both gesture and words and, stepping past her, closed the window with so much unnecessary violence that its panes rattled. Then he pulled the blind halfway down as if to shut out the unbearable loveliness of that spring day. But the slanting sunshine was kinder than he was, for it threw upon the floor under her feet a pool of yellow light in the midst of which she continued to stand, like a woebegone leaden statue in a fountain of gold.

“I did it for you! I did it for you!” she brought out recklessly, too unhappy under his rep oaches and too dazed in her mind to care what inmost secrets she betrayed.

He stared at her in sceptical bewilderment.

“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about, Netta,” he said; and then, fumbling awkwardly in his pocket for a cigarette, “Oh, do sit down!” he added, crossly and petulantly. “How can I talk to you when you’re standing there like a petrified image?”

“Rook!” she said, moving a step toward him.

Something in her expression touched a chord of remorseful tenderness in him and he took her in his arms; but he had no sooner done this than the overpowering smell of liquor in her breath extinguished the impulse. So as not to hurt her feelings he continued to press her against his shoulder and to let her lean all her weight upon him; but it was with a cold, unhappy, weary eye, without warmth and without pity, that he took in, over her bowed head, the familiar aspects of the room and the great stream of sunlight, full of flickering dust motes, that wavered across the floor.

As he looked at those tiny illuminated specks he thought to himself how likely enough it was that each one of these atoms was itself an enormous world, a world that doubtless at that very beat of time — perhaps a whole year of it — contained many Rook Ashovers in the process of disentangling themselves from many Netta Pages!

And the immense misery and futility of the whole boundless spectacle drove itself into his brain. What suffering! What misunderstanding! What cruel dilemmas! And all issueless and meaningless as that dance of April sun motes!

He registered in his mind a deep, silent vow that he would never, whatever happened to him afterward, forgive the Power that was responsible for this fermenting-vat of misery. No conceivable rearrangements or renewals or redemptions should ever make up, to him, at any rate, for what certain sensitive organisms are compelled to endure while this particular sphere is turning upon its axis!

Though he retorted thus, with all the righteous anger at his command, at the shameless First Cause of human suffering, his own nature was such that it never occurred to him to ask her again what she meant by that obscure cry: “I did it for you! I did it for you!”

And she, recovering now, as she clung passionately to him, both her sobriety and her love, recovered simultaneously with these her original heroic resolution.

In the strength of nothing less than this she extricated herself at last from his embrace, and some blessed principle of chance ordained, in defiance of the malignity of fate, that she should not know how cold and perfunctory, how weary and without human pity, that embrace had been!

No sooner had she recovered her mental balance and moving across to the bed had stretched herself out on it, a natural and touching smile upon her face and her hands clasped behind her neck, than there came the sound of wheels upon the gravel of the front drive. Pandie had been extremely expeditious in her embassy, and Mr. Twiney and his horse were at Rook’s disposal.

Netta was clear-witted enough now to understand from the look upon his face that there was something about the appearance of this conveyance at this moment that agitated and troubled him.

He moved to the window and stood there with his back to her, absorbed in miserable thought. Netta guessed shrewdly enough that he was suffering from the particular situation of all situations which he dreaded most: that of having to make a quick and momentous decision. She resolved to help him to make this mysterious choice at once‚ whatever the consequences might be.

“You’ve got an engagement, Rook‚” she said quietly. “So don’t let me keep you. You needn’t worry about me any more. I’m all right now. I’ll ring for Pandie presently, when I’m dressed, and have my tea. Then I’ve got a nice story to read till you come back. Or I may go out. That’s what I’ll do,” she added cheerfully and firmly. “I’II go out for a bit! So don’t worry. I shall be here; and quite good and quiet, Rook dear, when you come back.”

He found it the easiest thing to do at that moment, just to obey her; just to take advantage of the velvet cloak she snatched off her heart and spread out before him‚ covering the fissures that yawned under their feet, covering the mud, covering everything!

“I’ll tell her about Ann and me to-night,” he said to himself. “It’ll be easier to tell her at night. Her mind is not calm enough yet.”

His brain said other things to his heart, too, as he moved irresolutely toward the door, his eyes fixed on her face and his hands fumbling with the buttons of his overcoat. Had not her resolution held firm, with all the power of her love for him tightening the fibres of its cruel strength, had she collapsed again, or appealed to his feelings, or clung to him in the blind pathos of her helplessness‚ the probability is that he would not have found it in him to go.