John Powys - Ducdame

“No,” he repeated monotonously to every appeal. “No. She only gave me that letter, which I gave you. Beyond that, you know as much of what happened as I do.”

“Hastings, you’re not concealing something from me because you think that if I get hold of Netta again it’ll make my wife and my mother miserable, and upset everything? If that’s what’s in your mind I give you my word I won’t bring her back! I’ve no thought of bringing her back, anyhow. It’s the last thing I want to do now. I only want to see her, to know where she is; to get rid of this awful sensation of blankness and emptiness.”

“So you feel like that, do you?” said William Hastings, pushing the matchbox across the table and lighting a cigarette himself. “I have often wondered, Ashover, whether it was possible for you to feel a thing like this, simply and naturally, as an ordinary man would feel it.”

“Did she mention,” interjected Rook, “when she was talking to you, any names of her friends?”

“She spoke of someone called Minnie,” answered the other.

“That was it! Minnie!” cried Rook eagerly. “Did she mention her surname? Did she mention what theatre she worked in? Did she mention what part of London she lived in?”

William Hastings drummed with his fingers carelessly on the table. He had given Rook his only easy chair; and he himself sat erect and nonchalant on the chair he used when he wrote.

“No. She mentioned no surname and no theatre. She talked of Minnie a great deal. She seemed very fond of Minnie. I began quite to visualize this remote young woman; not by her appearance exactly; but by the way Netta made you understand the sort of person she was. I got quite interested in Minnie, Ashover.”

“You’re sure she hasn’t written to thank you for that money? That’s the thing I cannot understand.”

Hastings became aware that irony and sarcasm were entirely irrelevant at that moment.

“No. She hasn’t written to me,” he answered simply. “If she did , of course I would tell you at once. I expect she’s got a place in some theatre. Has it occurred to you, Ashover, to go the round of the London theatres?”

Rook cast a puzzled, scowling look at his host. He became vaguely conscious that this little stubby dark-eyed man with the Napoleonic paunch was practising some derisive trick upon him.

“The round of the theatres? Good God, Hastings! what do you mean? Do you mean that I should enquire from every manager in London what people are on his list?”

The clergyman looked at him now with unmitigated malevolence. “Why don’t you apply to some detective office, Ashover? Those people are trained like dogs for just this kind of thing. They would probably ferret her out in a very short time.”

“I have thought of that,” replied Rook, crossing his legs and lighting another cigarette. “The objection to my doing it is, I’m afraid, a ridiculously simple one; and you know what that is, Hastings!”

Hastings lifted his eyebrows and drummed on the table with his plump white hands. “I can guess,” he said.

“I just haven’t any cash,” went on his visitor. “I mean, nothing approaching enough for a thing like that! And besides — I suppose you’ll think it silly; but I have a sort of horror of using detectives to find Netta.”

“Perhaps you don’t really want to find her,” said the clergyman.

Rook looked at him sharply from the depths of his armchair. He began to be much more conscious than he had been at first of the maliciousness in the man’s tone.

“Why do you say just that, Hastings?” he asked drily; and if the priest had been more clairvoyant than he was he would have become aware of a sudden veering of the psychological weathercock.

It had begun to dawn upon Rook that this man was, in some secretive way he could not quite define, playing a game with him.

“Oh, I don’t mean anything, Ashover. I understand well enough how you shrink from using those people. I only meant that sometimes one is unconscious of the real impulse behind one’s actions.”

“You’re sure you didn’t give her any more than those fifteen pounds?”

As he spoke Rook looked at the pale, plump face above him with its heavy-lidded greenish-black eyes and became conscious of the fact that he had no more notion of what went on in this extraordinary person’s mind than he had of what went on in the mind of some great toad hidden under a rhubarb leaf in Nell’s little garden.

Rook had insisted upon returning to Hastings that particular sum; and the clergyman, unwilling to make an issue out of a point of that kind, had accepted the money in the spirit in which it was given.

“Not a penny more,” repeated the man at the table, resting his chin upon his hands and staring at the oblong frame of grayness through which the scented night air came floating into the little room.

Rook uncrossed his legs and clutched the arms of his chair with angry, bony fingers. He scowled helplessly at the impassive countenance above him. There was something in the immense silence of that slowly descending etherealized darkness that seemed to render it a kind of brute stupidity in him not to be able to read his companion’s thoughts. That impalpable summer air was like a condensation of the thoughts of the terrestrial globe itself, strange, dreamlike, non-human, such as rose and fell, fell and rose, with the rhythm of some vast, placid, elemental sea.

Rook longed to tell the man that it was Nell herself who had suggested that he knew more of Netta’s plans than he had confessed; but even in his present harassed impatience he had not quite the cold-blooded cynicism to drag the young girl into their colloquy.

“Shall we have a light?” he remarked at last, when it seemed to him that Hastings was prepared to go on staring into the darkness without motion or change or limit.

The man did rise from his seat at this; moving stiffly, like a person whose soul has returned to its body after some long translunar journey. He lit a couple of candled and put them down on the table before him; where they bowed gently in that perfumed air, one after the other, like two grave acolytes in the presence of a dark altar.

“Hastings,” said Rook all of a sudden when, with no change in his position, the theologian had resumed his mute dialogue with the wordless spaces.

“Well, Ashover?”

“If Netta, by any remote chance, does write to you, you won’t fail to let me hear of it at once?”

Hastings smiled. “Of course I’ll let you know of it, Ashover.”

The curious thing at this moment was, that, by reason of some inherent duplicity and illusion-weaving power in Nature herself, the priest was actually fortified in his dissimulation by the great flow of honey-scented darkness which now flooded everything and drowned everything.

It was as if “the still small voice” of the very planet we live upon, when, in the absence of wind or storm, it makes itself felt from its inmost interior integrity, were saturated with some irremediable ultimate evasion. It was as though this old protean universe, when once you reached its native inherent character beneath all its masks and transformations, had its own secretive life illusion, its own eternal magic-bestowing falsehood, from which the subterfuges and equivocations of the human race drew living nourishment.

“Hastings,” said Rook again. “If you did by any chance find out where Netta was, you haven’t got any grievance against me, have you, that would make you want to hide it from me?”

Whatever may have been the reservoirs of planetary duplicity from which the priest was able to draw his support there was no need to use them just then; for an interruption occurred which saved him from any reply.