John Powys - Ducdame

His words came to her ears one after another, like the rattle of musketry, heard from behind the torrent of some tremendous volume of falling water, some splashing Niagara of doom in her own mind. She had not realized till that second of time how far she had gone in her vague irrational hopes about the future, about a future in which he and she were, by some heavenly sorcery, linked together. Consciously it had been to her no more than an enchanted episode, “the perfume and suppliance of a minute”; but in the unconscious recesses of her mind — as happens with most women — she had been spinning, like an insatiable little silkworm, a subterranean cocoon of romantic inventions.

But it was over now; over for good and all; and she must get back to those self-effacing moods; those moods whose sweetness — though she had not guessed it at the time — must have been craftily nourished by these irrational wellsprings of hope, far, far below the surface.

She must get back to that feeling she had had, on the day in the Ashover drawing room, when he fell at her knees wounded, distraught, beside himself; and she became for the moment a calm healing spirit, without a single selfish desire of her own.

“They won’t have gone, will they?” she murmured, as they pushed their way back through the entangling undergrowth by the way they had come.

“They’ll have waited! They’ll have waited!” he kept saying, as he hurried forward.

When they came to the place where the ground was swampy and their feet sank into a substance that was brown-black with the dissolution of bark and leaves and grass roots and ancient moss, he put his arm round her waist to lift her faster along.

It was not till they were close to the hedge dividing the wood from the hayfield that Rook realized, as he released her waist and let her pause to tidy herself up and put on her hat, how white her face had become and how dazed and numb her whole being was. But self-absorbed in the mania of his remorse, it did pierce the armour of his egoism to see the look in her eyes as she stood fumbling with her hair in front of him, her arms raised and her body flecked with the shadows of leaves and branches. He became conscious that she, too, this troubled figure with the sycamore shadows wavering upon her dress, was unhappy in the same sort of way he was unhappy and without his toughness to bear it.

For a moment they passed out together beyond the circle of both their deep-bitten sorrows; and it was as if what he had felt as he gazed into Betsy’s Cimmery Land crystal rose up again from beneath and beyond them and lifted them into a region outside the sphere of all human confusion.

“They’ve waited!” he whispered. “I can see Lexie and Mother. It’s all right, Nell dear!”

She smiled in answer and instinctively held out her hand. He took it and held it for a moment. “You’ve been very good to me, Nell,” he said. “I don’t know what I should do if I hadn’t got you.”

These last words of his coming after her realization, that afternoon, as never before, of how little, after all, she really meant to him, sounded as hollow to her ears as the mocking rhetoric upon a tombstone.

She did not speak but dropped his hand as one who had come to the end of her endurance and whose only desire was to escape. Breaking away from him she pushed blindly through the hedge and walked across the field without looking back.

IT WAS just ten o’clock on that same June evening. So late was the sun in sinking and so protracted was the twilight that even now, although the last yellowish-green spaces in the infinite horizon had faded into steely gray, there yet remained a pallid nebulosity in the air, a nebulosity that seemed to emanate from the surface of the earth, as if the earth were its own moon and had the power of holding back both the velvety invasion of darkness itself and the natural luminousness of the high stars.

Nell had gone to bed by that curious earth light without requiring a candle. She lay now in an exhausted and docile suspension of all her energies; letting the fragrant airs that floated in through the open window stir her hair faintly and lightly upon her forehead and become the accomplices of that abnormal twilight of twilight which made the planetary orb itself resemble a leaf-shadowed glowworm.

She listened for a while in motionless passivity to the murmur of men’s voices in the study across the passage. She even smiled to herself a little as the fantastic notion crossed her mind that she might be a girl in Damascus or Antioch or Stamboul or in some place where women had nothing of the free initiative such as they possessed on the banks of the Frome.

With this fancy still in her brain and the large serenity of that June night lulling her senses, she turned over on her side toward the wall. There, in the pallid dimness, she stared passively at a little chance-drawn mark on the gray-plastered surface before her, a quaint little hieroglyph of the fingers of accident, which had come to take many strange shapes and be associated with many strange feelings during her life in that room. Before she slept on this occasion that little scrawl took the shape of Mr. Twiney’s cart; and in the cart, erect and straight, stood the figure of Lady Ann, holding the reins, like a classic charioteer!

She had a vague feeling that she herself was fleeing from this equipage, fleeing down the glade of a deep, deep wood; and then, all in a moment, like the celestial clouds thrown about their favourites by the Homeric gods, a great friendly mist received her and enveloped her; and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

Meanwhile, in the room opposite, a momentous and peculiar dialogue was imprinting itself, like a disordered pattern under the hands of a drink-crazed artist, upon the ethereal stuff of that June night.

“She gave you no sign, no hint, then — not one of any kind — as to where she was going when she got to London?”

William Hastings shook his head. Far down in the priest’s subconscious nature there stirred a malicious exultation at the fact that he was holding back Netta’s secret from this rival of his.

During these last two months, parallel with the cessation of his writing, there had arisen within him a more possessive attitude toward his wife, an attitude that made it harder for him to endure the girl’s attraction to Rook. By one of those inexplicable contrarieties which seem so inevitable an adjunct to all erotic emotions, instead of being tempted to reveal Netta’s address to Rook and thus to side-track him away from Nell, he was fortified and strengthened in what he had come to regard as a sacred contract with the other woman.

It is likely enough that in any case he would have held fast by his oath to the runaway; but under the present circumstances this oath became more and more of a superstitious trust, a trust into which he flung not only what was obstinate and unyielding in his nature but what was malicious and revengeful.

His pride had been hurt far more than he himself had realized by his wife’s infatuation. He must have divined, even while still at work on his book, a good deal more of what was going on than he had permitted either Rook or Nell to detect.

He was a man whose subconscious emotions worked their way to the surface slowly, and, as it were, by a process of infiltration. His first response to his wife’s attraction to Rook had been philosophical and indulgent, just as his first response to Netta’s flight had been a concern for Rook himself; but both these moods were easy and superficial, while all the while there was gradually stirring within him a dark unconscious anger against Rook which only required the impact of some external shock or encounter to bring to head.

Thus in the matter of Netta’s address his feelings had become extremely complicated. He had begun by keeping her secret out of a vague loyalty to her but he found himself keeping it now out of a definite hostility to Rook.