John Powys - Ducdame

“London is enough address for any one,” she said, with that peculiar society tone that Hastings found so difficult to put up with. “You’ll hear of me, if I become a celebrated actress,” she added more naturally.

Hastings had taken for granted that since he had made it possible for her to escape he was in a position to demand her address, and this point-blank refusal outraged his sense of justice. When he understood that she really intended to remain obdurate, he began to regret that he had not made this stipulation earlier, made it before the means to exact it had passed from his hands.

It was eleven o’clock when this conversation took place, and the London express left at noon. The girl entreated him to say good-bye to her before she actually went to the station. She was nervous, she said, lest someone should recognize him, even if she herself passed unnoticed.

Her umbrella was rolled up neatly now and her black bag looked eminently respectable. No one would have recognized in this quiet dignified woman the forlorn creature of last night’s encounter.

They went together into a little dairy shop and had a luncheon of cocoa and halfpenny buns on a marble counter. It was then that, in a final attempt to change her resolution, he began to emphasize the unfairness of the course she was taking and its cruelty to Rook. The girl’s reply to this was to break, without a moment’s warning, into a passion of silent weeping. Her big tears, for it was a peculiarity of Netta’s to shed very large tears when she wept, came literally splashing down upon the marble table and reduced all his arguments to silence. Even at this juncture, however, he was struck by the manner in which women can give way to mental anguish and yet retain their consciousness of practical exigencies. For even in the midst of her tears he saw her glance at the clock and begin feeling in her purse to make sure she had not mislaid the money he had given her.

It came over him like a sudden illumination, the tenacious power of life in human beings, this mysterious life, against which he was waging his insane metaphysical war!

For Netta pulled out of her pocket one of those tiny handkerchiefs, compressed into the shape of a small puff-ball by being clutched in the palm of a feverish hand, such as all the lovers and all the sons of women see so often without seeing , as if they were the handles of doors or the knobs of bedposts, and after rubbing her cheeks and adjusting her hair looked straight into his face with a spontaneous smile.

That smile, more pitiful and more heroic than anything Hastings was destined to witness for many a long day, returned to his mind more than once in the course of the next twenty-four hours. It followed him back to his cottage by the water meadows. It followed him to his supper table. It followed him to his bed. And when he was next seated at his desk, reassembling the dark threads of his devastating philosophy, it troubled his sentences and ruffled his thought in the same way that the discovery of a gleaming bracelet in an ash pit would disturb the occupation of a gatherer-up of cinders.

Though there was so little of a link between them, the mere sense of the fatality and finality of the step she was taking made it difficult for both of them to bring themselves to the irrevocable moment of saying good-bye. He walked with her lingeringly down the narrow street, with its rows of little greengrocers’ and confectioners’ shops, faintly hoping as they went along that even yet, at the last, she might draw back from her desperate plunge.

They passed a vulgar modern hostelry entitled the Antiger Arms just before they reached the final turn to the station; and quite casually and with that peculiar kind of dull, sick, superficial curiosity, such as must often be the mood of condemned criminals as they are led to execution, the girl glanced into the little carriage yard of this place.

Her fingers clutched her companion’s wrist.

“There’s Mr. Twiney!” she whispered.

Hastings did not need to be told. With a rush of fierce relief, which showed how far below his misanthropic indifference his uneasiness at Netta’s departure had gone, he recognized the familiar figure of the most affable of his parishioners.

Netta made now an instinctive movement to escape; but the priest held her arm tightly and pulled her into the yard after him, past the painted shafts and the muddy splash-boards of a long line of farmers’ gigs, till he had attracted Mr. Twiney’s attention.

“Mr. Hastings! Lord ’a’ mercy on us! And Miss Page! Well, I’ll be blotted out of Book! Ay, won’t Squire be glorified to see ’ee! A’ve been raging and carrying on like a ferret in a poke. It’s been hither and thither with him and no mistake; no rest, no sleep you might say, since he drove wi’ I to get tied up to’s cousin. Ye’ve a-heard of that goings-on, I reckon? ’Tis all over Dorset. Tied up and married he be, safe and sound; but a’s had no pleasure in’t so far; only hither and thither, as a person might say. But a’ll be a man again now, belike, the poor gentleman, now you’ve a-found this lady, Mister Hastings!”

The clergyman looked at Netta to see if she had caught the drift as unmistakably as he had done himself of Mr. Twiney’s words.

Her head was rigid on her neck, but tilted a little to one side, like a flower-pot on the top of a dahlia stick.

“Mr. Ashover and Lady Ann are married, you say?” She repeated the words as if they were an echo of something else, of some other, quite different words that were resounding in her own ears.

Mr. Twiney looked at them now with an expression of grave concern upon his countenance. It came over him that he had “let his tongue hang out” as his wife Eliza was wont to express it.

“That be just how it be, miss,” he answered solemnly. “But don’t ’ee take on because of that, lady,” he added anxiously. “Gents like our Squire do marry or not marry same as the likes of I do throw peelings to pigs. ’Tis a small matter to they, lady. Why, ’tis nothink at all! They sleeps the same; and they eats the same. ’Tis a kind of whimsy with they, and I’m blind sure Squire’ll be as joyed to see ’ee as if he ain’t never set eyes on that grand young woman what is now his lawful missus!”

Hastings slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket and glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve. In fifteen minutes the express would come in. In twenty minutes it would have come and gone.

He found himself looking nervously at the entrance to the yard. At any moment, he thought, Rook might appear on the scene and settle everything!

Netta might have easily noticed both these significant movements on the part of her indiscreet protector; but at the close of Mr. Twiney’s speech she had produced a lead pencil and a bit of paper — legacies, both of them, from their night with Betsy — and had begun writing hurriedly and quickly. She held up the paper now toward William Hastings.

“That’ll find me in London,” she said. “But you must swear to me, by God’s truth, that you won’t show it to Mr. Ashover. Do you swear that?”

Confused and bewildered by the rapidity of her movement, and only anxious to retain her with him till the train had gone, Hastings gave her his promise.

“I shall Want to know how he gets on,” she murmured hurriedly, repossessing herself of her black bag which he had placed on the ground. And then with her hand on his arm: “But you swear you won’t even tell him you’ve got an address? If you do, if you give him the least hint, remember you’ve broken your word!”

She need not have pressed her point so desperately. In the earlier hours of their contact the priest’s consideration had been mostly for Rook, who, after all, was his patron if not his friend. But, as so often happens in these cases, when one enters an emotional imbroglio from one particular entrance it is likely enough that one comes out of it on quite the opposite side. Hastings had been swept so far into the tide of Netta’s feelings that it was impossible for him to remain the neutral spectator he had been at the beginning. The mere fact that she had taken him into her confidence as she had done drew him to her side and compelled him to divide his loyalty.