John Powys - Ducdame

“How is it we didn’t pass you?” enquired Lady Ann. “Is there any other way? I thought you had to come by the road.”

“So sorry I couldn’t manage that lunch with you, Nell,” he said, taking no notice of the questions asked him and putting out his hand for a cup of tea. “Ann has explained how it happened, I expect? She’d got farther afield than she ought and I had to take her home.”

“Oh, Nell perfectly understands!” cried Lady Ann, selecting a water-cress sandwich from the basket beside her. “Your apologies are so belated, my dear, that they’re really unnecessary. Aren’t they, Nell? It’s just like Rook, isn’t it, to be so formal in his explanations? You might think that we were all strangers, instead of — what we are!”

Her rich flute-like laugh rang across the hayfield and, her gray eyes, full of voluptuous malice, played mischievously over both her victims.

“I think it’s quite right for Rook to apologize,” said Mrs. Ashover. “I’m sure that’s the kind of thing I brought you up to do, isn’t it, Rook?” The little old lady surveyed her eldest son with ironic complacency.

“You brought us up to nothing of the sort, Mother,” remarked Lexie, holding out his cup to be refilled by Lady Ann and laying it carefully down by his side as he prepared to light a cigarette. “You put into our heads such an idea of the greatness of the family that every single thing we did was done as if an Ashover couldn’t do wrong.”

“I’m sure Mrs. Ashover never taught you anything of the sort,” threw in Nell gently, smiling at Lexie with a clinging, lingering smile on her unclassical mouth, while every nerve in her body responded tremulously to Rook’s closeness to her. “I’m sure the outside world regards you all as possessed of beautiful manners. Don’t you think so, Lady Ann?”

“Is that a subtle suggestion that however much I may marry an Ashover I must always remain an outsider?” retorted the daughter of the diplomatist.

Nell blushed. This kind of equivocal badinage was always embarrassing to her; and she felt vaguely that Cousin Ann was in some indirect way trying to make a fool of her.

Rook, who had been drinking tea and eating bread and butter like a man in a trance, now put down his empty cup, glanced whimsically at his wife, and holding out his hand to Nell to help her to get up, said quietly and naturally: “Come for a stroll with me, Nell, then, will you? And we’ll make up for our lost lunch by finding a wood-warbler’s nest. There used to be a lot of birds in these woods. Do you remember the black-cap’s eggs, Lexie? How we left two in the nest; and I broke all we took; and then got angry when you wanted to go back for one of the two we’d left?”

While he threw out these casual remarks to cover their retreat, Nell was struggling to regain her composure; struggling to get strength of mind enough to look Lady Ann in the face. The temptation to obey him and follow him was more than she could resist; but she knew well that his naïve masculine assumption that he was carrying off the situation by his flippant tone was entirely unjustified.

To Nell’s consternation Lady Ann herself at that moment scrambled up from the grass. “Black-caps!” she cried. “Oh, Rook, I’d no idea you had black-caps so near Ashover! We used to have to go so far out into the woods to see one; and then you generally heard it without seeing it!”

Rook’s mind at that moment sank down into a veritable gulf of misery. He saw himself for the rest of his life having to deal with this strong, capable, high-spirited woman, for whose personality at that moment, although she was the mother of his child, he felt not one single shred of love, but rather something that bordered very closely upon sheer hatred.

This occasion would probably be repeated again and again and again — the same difficulty in getting away; the same inevitable dissimulation; the same teasing contest. And yet he ought to have been gratified and thrilled at having the love of a girl as beautiful and distinguished as Ann Gore.

The truth was, he thought, as he let his brother Lexie take up his wife’s challenge and talk about black-caps, the truth was that men didn’t want the love of women, unless under circumstances that gratify a certain subtle craving in their life illusion , a certain subconscious self-love , which is deeper than any pride, or any vanity, or any conceit, or any lust! They want to love women themselves, in every possible kind of way, wickedly, tenderly, chastely, licentiously; but when it comes to a matter of being loved , they become harshly exacting and suffer from every sort of antipathy and repulsion unless in the one single case where their life illusion is satisfied.

The most immoral of men are monogamists in this sense. They are perfectly prepared to exploit the love that women give them and turn it to their own profligate account; but it rarely occurs to them that such love is in itself a rare and exquisite commodity. It presents itself rather as a tragic and burdensome appendage to a lovely and magical experience. It only becomes precious, as a thing in itself, when it answers the hunger of this mysterious life illusion which is deeper than possessiveness and stronger than sensuality.

Women, on the contrary, so Rook’s troubled thoughts ran, regard their own “love” as so rare and so precious, that it fills them with a sense of intolerable grievance when the man they care for slights it or undervalues it. They are ready then to accuse such a man of every sort of meanness and baseness. With malicious inspiration they label him with just the particular faults that are most hateful to him, associating their indignation against him with everything in the world except the one thing for which he is really to be blamed; the fact, namely, that he was betrayed into speaking their language when he was using them in his fashion.

He remembered vividly the latter taunts that his wife had levelled at him as they lingered together in the hall before he started. They were all unfair, unjust; beside the mark. And yet they hurt him just because they touched him where he was most sensitive.

She had accused him of having concealed from her what she called his “love affair with a little chit of a married schoolgirl.” And as they watched his mother coming down the Jacobean staircase she had flung at him the taunt which she divined would pierce him the deepest.

“It’s her blood in you, you know! That Gresham blood!”

While these thoughts passed through Rook’s mind his eyes were fixed upon the corner of the hayfield where Mr. Twiney’s horse had been tethered. They had taken him out of the shafts and he was nibbling now at the new honeysuckle shoots in the leafy hedge.

Great bushes of elder, crowded with flowery “patens” of ivory whiteness, stretched their branches down to the level of the cut grass; and the look of these heavy blossoms against the close-shaven ground gave to Rook a sharp sensation of some old childish memory that made his present sadness all the deeper.

The badinage that had been passing like an invisible shuttle-cock among that group of people subsided at last. “Don’t break the black-cap’s eggs this time,” cried Lady Ann after them as Rook moved away with Nell toward the edge of the wood.

They were still within sight of the others and were examining the tiny crimson petals of the first wild rose they had yet seen really in bud when the girl murmured anxiously in his ear: “We must never do it again, Rook. We must be very, very good from now on! Your wife is very angry with me. She despises and hates me, and I can’t stand it. Oh, Rook, how cruel it is for everything to be like that. when it’s all so beautiful!”