John Powys - Ducdame

He looked at her face vacantly as it was lifted up to him from under her broad-brimmed hat. Her mouth was twitching. Her eyes gazed at him through so much water of unfallen tears that he began absentmindedly to speculate — as if in the presence of a scientific problem — how it could be possible that they could remain as they were without brimming over and running down her cheeks.

“Come on,” he said abruptly. “Let’s get out of sight.”

They moved forward a few yards, skirting the hedge. Nell trailed her fingers through some tall umbelliferous flowers that grew amid the uncut feathery grasses. She hung her head and her heart felt weary within her. Was he in a mood to disregard all she’d been saying — all she had been vowing to herself of renunciation and effacement? Was he going to take her into all that lovely freshly budded greenery, into all that mass of leaves and undergrowth, of ferns and moss and entangled branches, and just seize upon her without further scruple?

Her heart began to beat violently. A vibrant tremor of magnetic excitement rose from the very centre of her soul and, like a mounting stream of quicksilver, quivered through the nerves of her body. By anticipating his unscrupulousness, his reckless indifference to consequences, as something already present before her, she was conscious of a sudden responsive thrill of complete abandonment.

They came to a gap in the hedge. Her heart beat so wildly that she was afraid the man must hear it. Where had fled all her self-sacrificing vows, all her resolutions of effacement? Glancing round at the others before she let him pull her up to his side on the hedge bank, she saw Lady Ann had gone over to the place where she had tied the horse and was re-adjusting the bridle so as to give the animal more scope to feed. There was something in this simple and natural proceeding that struck the girl’s mind with a sense of shame. She saw Mrs. Ashover, too, talking so quietly and happily with Lexie — both of them with their backs propped up against haycocks — that she felt as if there were something discordant, ill-considered, irrelevant in this ill-timed love of hers for this husband, this son, this brother, whose days might have stretched out so calmly before him in these pleasant places.

Rook helped her through the hedge, however, and led her straight into the wood. Above their heads the indefatigable little chiff-chaff repeated his two-syllabled monotone. From far up the woody slope, where the trees were taller and the undergrowth thinner, there sounded the Caw — Caw — Caw of the man’s own ragged-winged namesakes.

Nell’s skirts were stained with beech drippings, with the sticky amber-coloured tar of the spruce firs, with the brown oozings of patches of swamp ground, with the black moisture where accumulations of former rains had saturated the hollow interstices of elm roots and oak roots; with the dust of last year’s funguses. Burr prickles clung to her thin stockings. Her hair, for she had snatched off her hat and carried it now in her hand, was loose and rumpled, and full of bits of twigs and shreds of moss.

They came to a little open space, covered with thick bentgrass of a vivid emerald green and surrounded by young sycamores. Here they sank down exhausted and silent: Rook with his back against one of the trees, Nell huddled up at his side, her head resting on his lap.

The physical effort which she had had to make, in forcing her way after him through so many obstacles, had exhausted her to such a point that her nerves were now in complete quiescence. The movement of his fingers as they disentangled the various little objects that had got caught in her hair increased her feeling of profound passivity.

His own thoughts were perhaps sadder than they had ever been in his life. The very quietness of the moment, the faint innumerable summer sounds that came and went; the rising and falling of a cloud of indolent sunlit gnats, each one of them a little dancing speck of intense consciousness; the sharp reiterated strokes of a woodpecker hidden somewhere above their heads; the swaying of the bent-grass in a wind that was gentler than the breath of sleep: all these things seemed only to enhance and emphasize the lamentable futility of human life, its confusions, its blunderings, its pitiful misunderstandings.

His heart ached for Netta. If only he knew that she was alive; that she was at least in no desperate straits, in no hopeless misery! But this absolute dead silence lay like a block of heavy quarried stone upon the well mouth of all his natural happiness.

Nell’s voice broke the silence.

“It’s lovely here, isn’t it?” she said. “I’m very glad we came here, Rook. I shall never forget this afternoon. It was sweet of Lexie to make me come, wasn’t it? If it hadn’t been for him I never would have thought of it.”

The man did not answer at once; or rather he answered with a reassuring movement of his hand.

His actual thought at that moment was rather to be concealed than revealed; for it was one of those thoughts that isolate a person’s identity and put up a sort of invisible screen of malicious loneliness between oneself and one’s companion.

He indulged in the fantastic wish, in fact, that some sudden electric disturbance, some insane magnetic current, might kill at one blow every kind of “love” toward him in his mother, in his wife, in Nell. He would like to be loved by only two people in the world: by Netta and by his brother!

“Yes, I am glad Lexie brought you,” he said. “It would have been absurd not to have had you here. Ann is not really as jealous as she likes to pretend. But you know how it is with me these days! I can’t think of anything. I can’t concentrate on anything. I see Netta’s face, I see certain expressions of quaint enjoyment, of funny bewilderment, that she used to have, and it just paralyses me! I’m only half alive all the time. And I hate everyone — well! not quite everyone, Nell — who interrupts my thinking about her! Wouldn’t you suppose, Nell, that it would be possible by sheer willing to force a lost person to reveal his hiding place? It seems so grotesque, so mad, that she should be at this moment somewhere in London wanting to see me; and I should be here wanting to see her; and that we Cannot communicate in any way!”

Nell rose suddenly to a sitting posture and turned toward him. “Do you know, Rook,” she said, “I sometimes fancy that William knows more about her than he has confessed.”

“ What! ”—The word leapt out of Rook’s throat like a bullet from a revolver. “ What are you saying?”

He scrambled to his feet and pulled the girl up with him so violently that his fingers hurt her arm.

“Dear Rook!” she gasped. “I — don’t — I–I mean — I don’t suppose—”

The excitement in his face, the return of life to his eyes, the grip of his hand, revealed to her with fatal lucidity how little, in the deepest part of his nature, her own personality and all the romantic happiness that had passed between them really counted.

“Knows more about her? Hastings knows more about her? What do you mean? Has he said anything to you?”

“No — no — no — no,” she stammered hurriedly. “It was just a silly thought of mine. It was just that now and then, when I’ve talked to him about Netta, I seemed to feel as if he were uneasy in some way. I hadn’t thought of it seriously till this moment. Oh, Rook, dearest Rook, don’t think too much of so little a thing!”

“I shall come over to-night and talk to him. Will he be at home? He isn’t away for the night, is he? Let’s get back! My mother will be worried. We mustn’t keep them. We don’t want them to drive off without us.”