John Powys - Ducdame

As he took from her this little bit of paper he saw a look on her face which made him realize her identity as he had never done in the days at Ashover; realise it in the way human beings so seldom do realize these mysteries as they pass and repass in the casual encounters of life.

At the very moment, however, when this new perception broke the hard crust of the clergyman’s sensibility, Mr. Twiney, who had been staring at the entrance to the yard, suddenly called out in stentorian tones: “There he do go! There he do go!”

Hastings looked up and saw the figure of the Squire of Ashover on the farther side of the road, running as fast as his legs could carry him in the direction opposite from that of the railway. Rook had made a point of being on the platform to see that particular express go; but a policeman in the station, of whom he asked the eternal question he had been asking all day and night, had reported that he had just seen a woman, exactly corresponding to the description given, eating with someone in a little dairy shop in the town. “But whether she’s still there, Mr. Ashover, I can’t inform you, sir.”

If Mr. Hastings had been more of a strategist and less of a philosopher he would have clung to Netta at this crisis and made Mr. Twiney pursue his master. Instead of doing this he completely lost his head, bolted out of the yard into the road, and ran up the street after him, shouting: “Mr. Ashover! Mr. Ashover!” at the top of his voice.

A great brewery van nearly rolled over him as he tried to cross, and he had to draw back from under the very horses’ heads; and when he did get over, Rook was already some twenty yards away, running at a great rate, entirely oblivious of the fact that any one was following.

The policeman’s words had filled the unfortunate man with that sickening desperate hope that trembles, by its own extravagant impetus, on the verge of certainty. As he ran, he already saw Netta in the small shop; saw himself rushing in upon her there; saw himself hugging her savagely to his heart; saw the illuminated look with which she would greet him; felt a flood of sobbing, ecstatic relief, as if a dead body, loved beyond everything in the world, had been restored to life.

It came over him with a blinding rush of tragic certainty that if he let Netta slip out of his hands now at this moment she would disappear completely into the void. To find her, to speak to her, to hold her now was his one chance!

He was actually within a few paces of the very place where the girl and Hastings had had their hurried meal when the latter overtook him.

The priest was too breathless to do more for a moment than stand gasping. As he struggled to speak he could hear in the distance the unmistakable thunderous sound of the Great Western express rolling into the station.

“She’s there!” he gasped. “Rook, she’s there! She’s got her ticket for London!”

The unhappy victim of the hunting dogs of remorse did not delay a minute. Like a leaf in the wind he turned his face; and breathing hard as an animal that reverses his track, he rushed off the way he had come, scattering the astonished pedestrians and making the drivers of market carts and trade wagons turn round to stare at him.

It had not been wasted, even on the indurated skull and irresponsive nerves of Mr. Twiney, that as the man ran so desperately north-northeast, the woman hurried with equal precipitation south-southwest.

He returned to the stable, and in order to be what the poet calls utrumque paratus (prepared for either event), he began harnessing his long-necked mare, expressing, as he did so, his own commentary upon these events into her cavernous ear.

“He’ve a-run from train and she’ve a-run to train! That’s how things do go, Liza, me beauty. ’Tis a pity for man and beast, me lass, that ’tis so, but so ’tis and us has best reckon on’t. He that way, she this way! ’Tis only to be trusted, me little hoss, that since World be round and Christmas be coming, this poor sorrowing gent and his sweetheart’ll cuddle down yet, comfortable and sly, spite of all accidents.”

Philosophers may have had, ere now, sufficient detachment from human feelings to contemplate the cruel tricks of time from the point of view of eternity; but though William Hastings, as he followed his desperate patron at a slower pace, endeavoured to regard these things with ironic equanimity he found himself listening with the most agitated attention to the distant puffing of the great green-painted engine as it waited in the station.

As for Rook, driven, as it might seem, by the Eumenides themselves, he had no strength left for any thought in his head except to reach that platform before the train moved out. On this return run he no longer visualized his encounter with Netta. His heart seemed on the point of bursting in his body, as he dashed along, keeping to the roadway in spite of the traffic, so as to be less impeded.

He did suffer from a vague impression as he ran that if he only could find breath in him to shout her name the girl would be bound to hear him and unfasten her carriage door, even if the train were moving. But, as it happens in dreams, his voice seemed to die away, ineffectually, in his throat. The nearer he came to the station the more clearly he could hear the heavy snorting of the locomotive, waiting like a great leashed hound to rush forth again upon its way.

He ran faster yet, and still faster, a strange enough figure in his long flapping ulster, his arms bent at the elbow, his fingers digging into the palms of his hands. Every second that passed seemed to him like something more living and terrible than just mere time; seemed to him like the pulse beat of a long-drawn-out gigantic arm — the invisible arm of his desire — the fingers of which were already clutching the door handle of Netta’s compartment, at which the railway guard was standing now with his whistle at his lips.

The whole world was reduced to a very simple equation at that moment, to the coming together for ever, or to the rending apart for ever, of Netta Page and Rook Ashover. Nothing existed for him, as his breath came in gasps, but the formless outline of an unspoken cry, a cry that implied words and yet was never destined to be uttered in words; the cry, “Netta, stop! Netta, stop! Netta, it’s all right!”

He actually heard the guard’s whistle now and the louder responding whistle of the engine. He rushed blindly forward. He did not realize that he was shouting wildly as he ran. Afraid that he would not have time to force his way through the doors and the crowds of the waiting room, by an infernal piece of misjudgment, one of those fatal blunders that seem like the very hoof of a demon outstretched to trip a man up, he veered aside when he heard the train moving, and rushing round the corner of the building, saw himself jumping on to the platform of one of the last carriages, perhaps of the guard’s van itself! God! There were high iron gates at this spot; gates to climb over which he would have had to be a veritable acrobat.

It was over. It was all over. He was too late.

He shook the iron bars of the gates with his hands, and out of his mouth came a hoarse frustrated howl.

The train was moving too fast now and his eyes were too blinded to see her face at the window; but she saw him, and a kind-hearted commercial traveller in the seat opposite her was horrified to see a quiet-looking, white-faced woman leap up and begin fumbling with the handle of the door. “Can’t get out now, missy!” the worthy man protested; pulling her back with gentle firmness into her seat.

When William Hastings arrived at the station he was more disturbed than surprised to observe a small crowd of porters and cab drivers collected round the gates to the left of the waiting room. At his appearance on the scene they thinned themselves out and he was aware of the figure of Rook Ashover, seated on the ground with his back to some iron railings, gasping for breath and crying like an infant.