John Powys - Ducdame

He stopped and they both resumed their seats; he to light a cigarette, she to pin the flower very carefully upon the edge of her dress, against her neck—“exactly,” she thought to herself, “where he touched me just now.”

“No, no,” he said, “don’t you let that scene with Ann have any effect upon you at all. I give you my word of honour, Nell, that there’s nothing in it — nothing, nothing. She’ll be exactly the same to you when you see her next. Please, don’t let’s have any bourgeois ‘not-speakings,’ and so on, in our circle!”

“But. Lexie, I can’t go to this picnic after what happened to-day! I can’t face Ann after that! It goes against something in me which doesn’t feel at all ‘bourgeois,’ something that seems just the opposite of ‘bourgeois!’”

Lexie peered gravely at her through his cigarette smoke. “You’re wrong, Nelly dear. I tell you you’re wrong. It’s the very best thing you could do; for Rook, for yourself, for Lady Ann, for everyone. It is, indeed!”

The girl bent her head, frowning. She felt an unconscionable longing to see Rook that day. It was a chance she might not have again for many days; and it would be amusing, sitting on the back seat of Mr. Twiney’s gig with Lexie.

“How is Rook going to get over there himself?” she asked.

“He? Oh, he’ll walk. Do come, Nell. Do be a spirited, civilized, sensible girl, and come. My mother will think it awfully funny if you don’t. It’s her birthday, you know; and rather an event in our family.”

The girl looked at him dubiously. “I don’t — feel — as if I could face her and — and talk to her as if nothing had happened. She must think that Rook and I have been seeing each other much more than we have.”

Lexie got up and threw away his cigarette. It fell close to her feet and she put her foot on its thin wisp of smoke.

“Think what a meteorite that must seem,” she said, “to the tiny grass-insects. Isn’t it hard to realize, Lexie, how all that we feel is only like a little smoke in the grass?”

“What’s that?” he rapped out, and moving up to her he took her by the wrists and looked threateningly into her face. “What’s that? What’s that? Like a smoke? Well, and if it is— you dear troubled Nell — that doesn’t make it any the less important.”

He let her go and remained silent and very grave, looking away from her, away from that sunlit garden, where the early afternoon shadow was just beginning to pass from the gravel path to the box border; away from that piece of dusty white road outside his gate, where that very morning he had picked a bit of yellow stonecrop from the wall and a bit of ground ivy from under the wall, crushing them in his hands and only relinquishing them when Mrs. Bellamy brought him his breakfast, and it came into his mind how perverted, how corrupt, how mad with the worst madness there is in life it was to diminish one jot or one tittle of the unique, the miraculous importance of these heavenly sensations. “Oh, let me live another year — two more years— three more years!” he prayed to that June air and those June odours.

It was almost as if it came like a sign of acceptance, of recognition, from some hidden heathen deity, still able to exert his power in that Dorset village, that even as the man and the girl looked into each other’s eyes, there sounded from some neighbouring tree invisible to them both the world-old Cuckoo! Cuckoo! of the unconquerable augur of sweet mischief.

Lexie’s faced relaxed into a smile of thrilling satisfaction; every wrinkle in it deepening and radiating, while he rubbed his hands together. “It hasn’t changed its tune yet!” he cried. “The summer is only beginning.”

“Very well, Lexie,” said the girl with a deep sigh of submission. “I’ll go with you. I should only be perfectly miserable if I went back now to the house.” She paused, frowning. “I must have just a word with your brother. I couldn’t endure William’s coming back and this whole day being wasted. I don’t hate William as much as I used to, Lexie,” she added inconsequently.

“No one hates any one when his own life is all right,” he said. “Come on, you sweet Nell, let’s see if Mr. Twiney’s outside. If he isn’t, we might walk as far as that.”

He moved toward the house. “One moment,” he said. “I’ll just run in and tell Mrs. Bellamy.”

She watched him disappear.

Over her head flew the long-tailed bird, cuckooing as it flew. Awkward and yet rapid in its direct movement, it seemed to her, just then, as if it were no ordinary feathered creature; but rather a mysterious agent of the gods. She felt a sick repugnance at the thought of encountering Lady Ann again; but her desire to see Rook, to talk to him, to hear his voice, grew every moment more imperative.

Far away though it was now, she could still hear the voice of the cuckoo; and in some inscrutable manner the sound of it acted as an irritant to hear nerves, making her restless and impatient, making every minute of delay seem fraught with some kind of vague danger to both herself and Rook.

At the very moment when the young girl was thus concerned about him, Rook himself, having eaten a hurried lunch, was walking quickly across Battlefield.

Before leaving the house he had opened his iron cash box and placed two five-pound notes in his pocket.

“I’ll settle that business with Betsy,” he thought, “on my way to High Mead.”

As he passed the Drools’ cottage he was observed by Binnory, who promptly followed him into the lane and overtook him at a run.

“Squire Ash’ver!” cried the idiot breathlessly. “Take I with ’ee to see the gippoos! Take I with ’ee to see them two who be half beasties and half men! Take Binnory with ’ee, Squire Ash’ver, and he’ll do summat for ’ee one day! So he will, too, summat ’ee never’d guess at! Take I with ’ee, Squire Ash’ver!”

Rook turned toward the excited boy with a look of positive hatred. He remembered his behaviour to Lady Ann. He associated him with Corporal Dick.

“Go home, Binnory!” he rapped out. “Get home with you, child!” And he quickened his pace to shake off this unwelcome attendant.

He had never been quite satisfied with the accepted version of the lad’s paternity. In his heart he had more than once accused Uncle Dick of being his father; but that was at moments when this whole business of the “Ashover immorality” grew to the dimensions of an obsession.

They all had the same taint! His father with Nancy Cooper, Corporal Dick with this gamekeeper’s wife, his grandfather with the Corporal’s mother — they had all, in taking their pleasure, become the causes of hideous complications.

If he had let Netta alone, perhaps by this time she would have married some honest man and been as happy as women are; whereas now— His thoughts recoiled from the fantastic abominations his imagination called forth.

“Squire Ash’ver! If I give ’ee them three girt blue her’n’s eggs I’ve a-got hid away, will ’ee take I to see the half beasties?”

The lad was trotting by his side now, his mouth open, his eyes furtive and foxy. Rook began to lose his temper in earnest. There was something peculiarly irritating to his nerves just then in this encounter. It was bad enough to have to deal with old Betsy and her “partners.” There came over him an unpleasant sense of being surrounded by crowds and crowds of Ashover bastards, each new one more repulsive than the rest. He felt like Macbeth, contemplating the interminable descendants of Banquo.

“Get away with you, can’t you?” he cried angrily. “What do you mean by following me like this?”

“Don’t ’ee talk to I like that, Squire Ash’ver,” pleaded the boy, his tone wheedling and coaxing.