John Powys - Ducdame

Over and over again she had told herself to wait till the birth of her child. Then, surely, if it were a son — and she had made up her mind that it would be a son — Rook’s interest in her, in life, in everything would come back!

All would be well if only this poisonous stabbing of jealousy would cease.

What a thing jealousy was!

It was like an actual sharp thorn pressing into her flesh; a thorn through which a little rankling stream of fermenting poison ran like a corrosive acid through her secretest veins.

Cousin Ann smiled bitterly and miserably with her beautiful full lips. How she would have mocked at herself half a year ago! How she would have sworn that such emotion as this was nothing but a silly female affectation! It was like a definite material malady. She could almost localize it; as if it were a malignant growth within her physical frame, counteracting with its persistent throb the sweet lethargy of pregnancy.

The thing was made worse for her — though she herself was unconscious of this — by the innate primitiveness of her nature. With all her social breeding Ann Gore was essentially an unsophisticated, natural, savagely simple creature of earth. Rook’s ingrained cerebralism, those dehumanized ponderings upon life, into which he used to fall, even in the early days of their companionship, had never so much as penetrated the outer surface of her smooth feline skin.

But it was this uncertainty that maddened her most!

Was Rook unfaithful to her with this funny-looking little clergyman’s wife, as well as with the ghost, the phantasm, the wraith of Netta?

She had felt so confident that if once she got hold of him, in complete intimacy, the spirit of her youth, her vitality, her strength would soon put an end to these aimless philanderings!

But there had been no intimacy! The ghost of Netta stood unappeased upon their bridal threshold holding them apart. And kept like this at a distance from him, all that was most formidable in her, the beauty and power of her body, the pathos of her pregnancy, the resilience of her spirit, remained unused, unexerted, disallowed.

She was like a strong and beautiful plant cut off from water and sunshine by some invisible yet insurmountable barrier.

The uncertainty, the miserable uncertainty! It was becoming more than she could bear. With a resolute movement, more obstinate than any she had yet made, she rose now from that sun-warmed seat, adjusted her summer hat, pulled her embroidered smock smoothly down over her rounded hips, picked up her long-handled parasol, and started off toward the entrance of the garden.

She emerged into the road and, with slow deliberate steps, without hurry or hesitation, proceeded to cross the bridge.

All that enchanted summer landscape quivered and vibrated around her in an air that was almost windless. The tall grasses of the ditches and hedges seemed like undulating ripples in a vast umbrageous sea, of which the deep-grassed hayfields, full of buttercups and red-stalked sorrel and white daisies, were the untraversed ocean floor, and the hills and copses and orchards the spray-flecked waves!

The Frome itself flowed high and strong that day between its banks, where tarnished marigold stalks and freshly sprouting rushes gave to the muddy roots of willow and alder the dignity of microscopic African swamps, with newts for alligators and tiny green frogs for hippopotami.

The fecundity of summer filled every little hollow and crevice in those banks with infinitesimal growths, nameless except to botanists, many of them the embryonic sproutings of plants destined to wait a couple of months, or even longer, for their time of flowering.

Crossing the bridge and following the familiar road, now white and dusty between its uncut grass borders, Lady Ann walked forward with a firmer, surer pace. She used her red parasol as a walking stick. Her summer hat, with a cluster of tulips beneath its wide brim, was held high and straight on her proud young head. Her mind, as she walked, was not oblivious of the singing of at least three invisible skylarks, out of a sky as blue as a Della Robbia plaque; and in the vigour of her youth, even against her conscious mood, her senses began to respond to the jocund pulse beat of a prodigal, lavish, irrepressible countryside!

It was about half-past twelve when she arrived at the wooden bridge near the sheep-washing pool which marked the halfway point between Ashover Church and Ashover village. Just beyond this bridge, on the side of the road opposite to the water meadows, there was a little field path which mounted slowly, through a couple of green barley fields, to the rough open country below the northern extremity of Heron’s Ridge.

Cousin Ann climbed over the stile leading to this path and began slowly ascending the incline between the divided masses of immature green stalks. Skylarks trilled and trilled above her head, one song blending with another song in that peculiar timeless ecstasy which seems to have more in common with the scarlets and blues of some great Venetian picture than with any musical instrument.

She had crossed the first barley field and had reached a thickset hedge which was now a mass of new leafage mingled with a weight of dim, half-faded hawthorn blossoms. She turned to her right at this point and moving slowly through the feathery grasses between the green barley and the hedgerow advanced to a spot on that sloping hill from which she could look straight down to the back entrance to Toll-Pike Cottage.

All the wide stretch of the Frome valley lay before her, green and lovely in the quivering translucent noon heat of that summer day. Out of the level plain of the brook meadows the familiar outlines of the church and its gravestones stood like a reef of gray rocks in a green halcyon sea.

Between the excited woman and the mysterious power emanating from the mortality of that place there was a formidable and strange correspondence — a correspondence that did not rise to the level of the girl’s mental consciousness, but affected her, none the less, and strengthened, so to speak, the despotism and magnetism of her will. Lady Ann had all the Ashover dead behind her; supporting her, sustaining her, protecting her; as if she were a faithful seaworthy ship into whose care they had entrusted their last forlorn hope.

The kitchen door of Toll-Pike Cottage stood wide open and from where she stood she fancied she could detect the form of Nell’s enormous tabby cat asleep on the sun-warmed threshold.

She hesitated a little now; not for any emotional reason, but because her instinct as a landowner’s daughter relucted at the notion of crossing a field of corn that was already ankle-high.

She moved on a few hundred yards, searching for the faintest vestige of a path. The brown mould as she continued to thrust her parasol between those spears of diaphanous green was not yet so devoid of moisture as not to emit its own peculiar smell — the smell of the actual flesh of the earth — which mingled so naturally with the sharp sour scent of the growing stalks. In spite of the obstinate anger in her heart which was driving her forward, her whole physical being found itself responding to that immemorial contact, the contact of a woman who has conceived, with that which conceives and brings forth all life.

Suddenly her spirits rose in triumph. There was a little path!

From a gap in the hedge, evidently an ancient secretive way, for the sticks that had been twisted across it had burst into leaf, right down to Nell’s very door, ran a narrow ribbon of brown soil dividing the expanse of barley.

Lady Ann hurried down this path, her skirts swishing against the growing corn, her parasol grasped tightly in her hand. The back door of the house was wide open and Nell’s great cat, the Marquis of Carabas, was fast asleep on the threshold. Cousin Ann with noiseless fingers unhooked a little wire gate which was there, and stepping over the ridges of William Hastings’s potatoes, approached the door.