John Powys - Ducdame

This point being settled he felt half inclined to return to his heretical colleague and ask for hospitality; but the memory of the wretchedly meagre quarters the man lived in, combined with a vision of the abnormal physical size of the foreign guest, made him shrink from such a step. He decided to dispatch a telegram to his wife and find a room in some lodging house or inn.

The hum and stir in his brain, reverberating and richocheting with dark and disturbing oracles, had driven him blindly on so far from the centre of the town that now, when he came to his senses and looked round for any sign of what he wanted, he found himself as much lost and confused as if he were in a completely strange country.

The sun had disappeared behind a bank of clouds, the edges of which wore that peculiar crimson zig-zag, so portentous and menacing, such as long ago the hawk-like eyes of Dante must have lit upon, as appropriate to the dusky walls of Dis!

This jagged torch flare in the west gave a yet more threatening and lurid aspect to the narrow poverty-stricken streets, abutting upon blackened sheds and upon desolate open spaces. There were shallow pools of rain water in some of these open spaces, pools whose metallic surface, livid and motionless, reflected this sunset glow.

Across the path of the sunset rose up certain dilapidated groups of melancholy and lamentable dwellings, from which a tall broken chimney here and a projected roof-corner there isolated themselves from their surroundings and stood out, black and ominous, against what looked like a vast bleeding wound in the ribs of the world.

Vaguely moving in the direction of the sunset, and falling back, as he went, so deeply into his wild cosmic speculations that he became oblivious of everything around him, it was not until he was right under the wall of a hideously recognizable building that he grew conscious once again of his human identity.

It was the Bishop’s Forley Workhouse which he now was skirting, feeling obscurely aggrieved, even as a philosopher, at the rubbish heaps and smouldering rubble mounds that made of this place a sort of Golgotha. One particular spot struck with a vibration of horror the tough nerves of this lover of Nothingness.

It was a sort of local potter’s field or pauper burying-ground, and it was entirely surrounded by iron railings some ten feet high. A fresh instalment of young nettles had come back with the coming of spring, but the old ones were there, too, interspersed with anonymous oblong mounds and with rusty tins and rain-drenched newspapers.

The look of the nettles between those tall iron railings presented itself to the mind of William Hastings in a sudden bleak objective light that was unusual with him. He stood still and stared in front of him.

On one side of the enclosure rose the blank wall of the Workhouse. There was only one iron-barred window in that forlorn expanse, and this window had caught from the afterglow in the western sky a certain greenish phosphorescent tint such as may be observed on the flesh of corpses.

On the other side of the enclosure were the roofless walls of a ruined factory: walls from which emanated that peculiar ghastliness of futility which only the work of men’s hands, when it has fallen into desuetude, is able to evoke.

What came over the mind of the heretic priest at that moment was a certain day, years and years ago, when, in the wretched playground of a second-rate preparatory school, he had watched a couple of his companions throwing handfuls of cinders taken from a galvanized iron ash bin at the body of a dead rat. He had been the laughing stock of the school even before that day for his inability to conform to their standards, but after that day his loathing for every aspect of youthful high spirits hardened into a misanthropic mania.

His mind recalled the loveliness of the country through which he had passed on his way to this town. It recalled the elaborate patient defence of a certain “hope against hope” advocated by the man from Germany. And there arose in him a ferocious wish that he could take this abomination of desolation, standing here so real and tangible in the twilight, and plant it down among the gracious meadows and the plausible arguments, so that none should escape its terrible significance.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps and he turned his back to the iron railings and waited, listening.

The steps came drifting along slowly, uneven spasmodic, shuffling, and stumbling. When they came round the corner by the ruined factory he saw that the figure bearing down upon him was that of a woman. She came up to him, muttering as she came, one hand dragging after her a torn umbrella and one clinging tenaciously to a black bag that swung half-open against her side.

When she reached him she stopped short and looked him straight in the face with a long, puzzled, half-understanding stare. Hastings knew her at once. His own mind was so wrought upon by what he had been feeling that it was with something less than a startled shock and yet something more than a casual comprehension that he recognized her and realized what her state implied.

“I’ve left that place — I’m never going back,” she said hurriedly; and then with a pitiable and almost infantile intonation: “You won’t tell them, will you? You won’t tell any one, will you?”

He sighed and made an awkward gesture as if shrugging his shoulders. The sight of her standing there with that wretched open bag and that trailing umbrella was something he had to deal with, to get into focus, to be drastic and practical about.

Like a slowly retreating wave, leaving only wisps of scattered spindrift behind it, to be blown at random hither and thither, his metaphysical thoughts fell back, fell away, displaying him, as the outside world generally found him, a quiet, self-controlled country priest.

What was this woman doing in the slums of Bishop’s Forley? And since he had encountered her there what did it behove him to do? For the flicker of a second his instinct was just to bolt, just to leave her as she was; but a kind of aloof, weary pity, mixed with the mechanical habit of his trade, kept him from such an extreme of callousness.

“I can’t take her back to Ashover to-night,” he thought. “I suppose I must take her to some lodging house.” He stood looking at her, as she let her vacant stare wander away from his face and drift along the wall of the Workhouse and over the Paupers’ Cemetery.

“Will she come with me?” he wondered, “and if she does, will she behave properly and stay in the room I find for her? She looks as if she might refuse to remain in any one place to-night.” And the man began to recall the various hopeless experiences he had had with women in this state.

While he hesitated and wondered what to do, Netta turned away from him and began to shuffle off down the road. This decided him. He stepped quickly after her and offered her his arm. She leaned upon it at once with a hopeless docility like that of some dazed and bewildered animal that has lost all power of individual decision. She even permitted him to take from her the black bag, which he at once proceeded to shut, and then to retain in the same hand with which he held his stick.

He did not dare reverse the direction she was following, knowing by experience that such interference with a person’s obscure desires is apt to cause any sort of outbreak or collapse. As a philosopher he let the whole thing take what course it would. As a clergyman he automatically assumed a kind of professional responsibility that remained on the alert for each new crisis as it might happen to arise.

They were soon outside the limits of the town. The deepening of the twilight about the solitary roadway, bordered by forlorn allotment patches and broken wooden palings, seemed rather to intensify than to diminish the dilemma of the exploited misanthrope.