John Powys - Ducdame

Lexie did his best not to smile as if he were speaking to an irrational child. He was conscious of a certain irritation against his brother. How badly things were arranged in this world. Why couldn’t all this romantic “havering” be concentrated on someone more fitted to appreciate it than this master of manias and inhibitions!

“And now I’ve really hurt her,” Nell went on. “She’ll think that there’s something serious between Rook and me and be up in arms whenever we meet. I’ve made things worse for Rook, made them much worse; and there’s actually nothing between us except what you know perfectly well — just what I happen to feel myself — which doesn’t matter to Rook at all or to any one else!”

Lexie’s half-conscious irritation against his brother betrayed itself now in spite of his humorous lightness of tone. “Tell me, Nell,” he said, “are you in love with Rook?”

The outrageous directness of this question did not seem to annoy the young girl. For some curious reason those plain significant words gave her a kind of relief. She liked the way Lexie uttered them. She liked to hear them being uttered.

“In — love — with — Rook?” she repeated very slowly. “I wonder if it is as thrilling as that. I certainly have never been in love with my husband if ‘in love’ means the sort of feeling I have for your brother. And yet William has been much nicer to me lately. He’s been steadily nicer and nicer since he stopped writing his book.”

“Has he let it go altogether?” asked Lexie.

She shook her head doubtfully. “I wouldn’t like to say that and I think it would be unlucky to say it. It might start him off at it to-morrow. But he certainly has not written a line — I know that for a fact — since the end of April. He wrote a little after Netta went away; and then he stopped. Why do you suppose he stopped?”

Lexie replied to this only by one of his characteristic grimaces.

“Don’t you worry about Ann, my sweet Nell,” he said. “She’ll be just the same to you. And when she’s talked to Rook about your lunch, and beaten him up a bit, she’ll be the same to him, too! These things are not really so terrible as people think they are. There’s a deal of conventional bluff in it.”

“Women think a lot about things like that,” murmured the girl feebly.

Lexie sawed the air with his hand; a trick of his when he got excited. The gesture was peculiar to him and its nature resembled the movement a person might make when obstructed by tall reeds in a thick swamp.

“They don’t really!” he cried with more emphasis than Nell had ever heard him use about anything. “It’s all put into their heads by what they read and by what they hear and by what they think that other people think. Left to themselves women would take these things very easily and very naturally.”

As he paused to take breath, for he had worked himself into a sincere agitation now and his gray eyes had become quite large and brilliant, the girl opposite him suddenly burst into a peal of unexpected laughter.

He looked at her with injured gravity, the naïveté of which made it harder for her to recover herself. His self-respect was genuinely outraged; but the graver and more discomposed he looked, the more difficult did she find it to stop laughing. It was as if Lexie had become a church, a funeral, a parliamentary debate, a meeting of scientists. She began to have what children call “a regular laughing fit.” She put her hands to her face, and tears of merriment ran down her cheeks.

“What the devil’s the matter with you?” he demanded, rising from his chair and approaching hers. His face wavered between sympathy for what might have been hysterical agitation and annoyance at what might have been childish rudeness.

His tone quieted her and she took her fingers from her face and searched about for her handkerchief.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’m so very sorry. It’s silly of me— You’re a dear, Lexie — I love you very much.” And she held out her hand to him.

He took it and refused to let it go.

“What was it that set you off just then?” he asked gravely. “Did I say anything especially ridiculous? Did I give myself away in some unpardonable fashion? Did what I said seem obvious and banal beyond words?”

“Dear Lexie!” murmured the girl, trying in vain to get her fingers out of the invalid’s clutch in such a manner as might seem natural and unconscious. “Dear Lexie! Of course you didn’t do anything of the kind! What you said was very sensible; and I daresay quite true. It was because it was so sensible that I laughed. I don’t think sensible things, or even true things, are ever the right explanations when it comes to women!”

Lexie’s countenance at that moment would have made an engaging study for some master painter; for some portraitist possessed of the psychological impressionism of Spain combined with the grandiose vitality of Venice. The little wrinkles in the skin of his cheeks indicated that his humour was tickled. An unusually concentrated frown in his heavy forehead suggested that his wits were piqued. While the way his drooping half-closed eyelids reduced his eyes — lately so wide open — to nothing but little narrow slits of amorousness denoted that the accidental imprisonment of a hand that desired to escape had already aroused the satyr in his blood.

“You steered me off just now,” he said, pressing the hand he held against the girl’s slender neck, “when I asked you a definite question. I don’t believe you’re half as much of an idealist as you think you are, you sweet Nell. Why do you keep that hat on? You’re not afraid of sunstroke, are you?”

As he spoke he used his free hand to pull out the one hatpin that the girl wore; and in a moment her head was bare. He stooped over her as if to follow up his advantage.

Nell’s own sensations at the moment were terribly complicated. His warm knuckles pressed against her neck sent a faint luxurious relaxation through every nerve of her body. She was so full of shame at her recent lapse from her own ideal that a great weariness possessed her heart, a weariness that could easily have found a numbing relief in letting him do what he liked.

But simultaneously with these emotions there suddenly rose up within her, to her own surprise, a surging wave of anger against him. What right had he to behave in this way? What right had he to assume that she would let him make love to her? She freed her hand with a jerk and pushed him back so violently and unexpectedly that he staggered.

“What are you doing, Lexie?” she cried indignantly. “I’ve told you before I don’t like this sort of thing!”

She didn’t catch the expression upon his face at this rebuff. She only heard him mutter something under his breath as he moved off; and then she saw him go hurriedly to the flower bed under the wall and stoop down. He seemed to be looking for something among the green shoots of the unbudded delphiniums, something that required much fumbling and searching for, if it were to be-found at all.

His body looked so thin and fragile as he stooped over the bed and his head so heavy, that a twinge of commiseration passed through her.

“What silly punctilious creatures girls are!” she thought to herself. “Why shouldn’t I have let him kiss me if he wanted to? He’s a much finer, a much more interesting human being than I am; and he’s ill, too! What a brute one is with one’s wretched pride and egotism!”

Lexie had found what he wanted now and came back smiling, his head held high, his hand extended. It was a single lavender-coloured, double French primrose, enfolded in its own large crumpled leaf.

“It’s the last left,” he said, handing it to her. “Fast-fading primroses covered up in leaves,” he added, purposely misquoting; “only this isn’t a real primrose. I never have been able to make out what mysterious old associations I have with this flower. It always gives me a peculiar sensation unlike anything else. Don’t you think, my sweet Nell, that there are certain memories in us that come straight down to us from our parents and through them from their parents? If it isn’t like that, what is it? Memories of our childhood before we were conscious?”