John Powys - Ducdame

The intonation of weary scepticism in his voice seemed to have a peculiarly irritating effect on the priest’s nerves.

“You’re not serious, Ashover,” he said. “No one who analyses his own feelings can get away from this great undertow of opposite tides — the death urge and the life urge. What I’ve discovered is that we can get behind the scene and pull up the dam, so that the death force can flood the whole field.”

Rook’s voice became more weary and detached than ever, as all the mysterious polarities in his nature focussed themselves in fierce secretive resistance to this vision that was invading and seeking to dominate his own.

“I think nothing of these forces of yours, Hastings,” he retorted. “Why stop at life and death? Why not have a whole vortex of conflicting powers? Life and death are just words! All we know is a mad chaotic jumble of things that we call ‘living’ and things that we call ‘dead.’ What I feel is that the whole imbroglio may be a set of obscene dreams, a great concourse of phantasmagoric shadows, most of them disgusting; some of them magically lovely! And what I would like to do is to dive down into some lake of nothingness where you could forget that there ever were such horrors!”

Hastings became conscious of a definite feeling of anger toward this man. A vague throb in some old deep scar within him reverting to some half-forgotten outrage his pride had received, when he, a child of middle-class origin, had been insulted by these careless aristocrats, began to mingle now with a rationalist’s natural indignation against merely fanciful speculations. These people never took these ultimate issues seriously. They were no more to them than the leap of fish in a mill pond! Phantasmagoric shadows! The great dark fragrant night about him, full of the odours of a red earth, pressed upon his brain with a sense of the thinness, of the irrelevancy, of these bodiless conjectures. Life? Did he not know its bitterness, its brutality only too well? Death? Was not this divine darkness a very symbol of the sweetness of the eternal sleep? He felt that if, at that moment, he could, by raising his hand, have plunged the whole stellar system into final destruction, he would willingly have raised it!

And this man, this Ashover, had now linked himself with a spirited, amorous girl who would soon — he knew it well enough! — satisfy this tenacious family’s desire to continue alive upon the earth. And his own fragile neurotic Nell was obsessed by her girlish fancy for this indolent sceptic; this persifleur who, with his pools of nothingness, posed as a martyr of remorse because he had driven his mistress out of his house! What did the man know about “Dimensions, levels, regions”? Phrases of that kind, how hollow, how rhetorical they were, with this enchanted June night whispering to them of the realities of life and death!

Far off across the wide water meadows he could hear at intervals the husky cry of some lonely nocturnal bird, a night-jar, perhaps, or a bittern; and the sound came to him as something that fortified his drastic vision of things. Was he not, himself, a solitary nighthawk crying out aloud, in a language no man understood, as he felt the damp airs of the great flood coming up over the marshes?

“What I feel about all this”—it was Rook’s voice speaking again, and more wearily, more indifferently than ever—“is that the true reality of things, the reality that we may wake up to when we die, is so completely different from life and death that it is a mere waste of time to argue about it. You say that my longing to escape is only the inverse of — well! of Lexie’s mania for living. But what of your own mania for death and destruction, Hastings? Isn’t that, too, with all the energy you throw into it, just the inverse of what you call the life urge? You are really just as dogmatic in your death-cult as Lexie in his life-cult! What I feed is that the whole thing is so mad and so chaotic that to dispute about it at all is to lend yourself to being fooled and deluded. Better let it alone; and just take each day as it comes.”

Hastings began to experience one of the most discomforting sensations that the human soul can endure, the sensation of feeling his spiritual pride menaced by something alien, He gave his chair a jerk backward in the darkness and clenched the fingers of his right hand so tightly that the nails nearly pierced the flesh.

It was absolutely necessary to him at that moment to find himself stronger, more formidable, more evil even, than this man who carried the airy indifference of his class into the very gulfs! And the sophisticated trifler was loved by three women! The struggle between them had by this time become one of those primeval struggles between two horned animals, in which power over nature, power over women, and power over God are fantastically mingled as the elements of a war to the death.

It seemed to Hastings, at that second, as if their hostility to one another, this sullen obscure wrestling that was going on in the darkness, occupied an arena that sank down into the very navel of the earth.

He felt a desire to go to the window and lean out. From where he sat he could detect a group of little faint stars; and he tried feebly to recall what constellation it would be that at that particular hour looked down upon Toll-Pike Cottage. A vague uneasiness had begun to trouble his mind; Was it possible that this Pyrrhonian attitude of Rook’s toward life, this careless, indolent, drifting “chaoticism,” gave the man the same advantage over him in philosophy as he possessed in the material world? But how could a person so casual, so formless, so evasive, be as close to the open secret as one who was concentrated and knit together, with a deep hard purpose in his mind?

He suddenly began to get an impression that Rook was playing with him, had been playing with him during the whole of their talk! That was an old trick of these accursed “upper classes.” You never knew where you were with them; you never knew where you “had” them! Like a cold finger of boreal ice pointing at his central nerve the abominable suspicion began to invade his mind that his whole system of philosophizing was only a weapon in a fierce personal struggle for recognition, for ascendancy. Apparently it was not necessary for an Ashover to have recourse to such weapons! They need not formulate their philosophy. They need not be logical or rational. They could play with the realities of life and death as they played with their dogs and their guns and their girls. They could just lie back upon themselves and be what they were and all the rest of the universe might go on as it pleased! “Chaoticism” indeed! That was exactly the word. To walk through the lanes and the woods; to enjoy his meals; to seduce a girl here and a girl there; and to hand on his name by a well-timed marriage to another generation, who would also lie back upon themselves and talk of chance and chaos; while he, William Hastings, who had put his whole life’s blood into a book of crushing, deadly, annihilating power only existed as an object of quaint interest, set aside as a fantastic-brained country parson who was useful for reading pious homilies in the presence of Ashover monuments!

“You won’t deceive me in any way over Netta, Hastings?” The words, coming from the other hidden countenance, in that midnight chamber, floated away out of the window toward the little, unknown group of stars.

“Deceive you? Why on earth should I deceive you? I tell you you know everything there is to be known in the whole world!”

The man’s voice took on at that point the peculiar quiver which indicates in highly strung nerves the approach of a collapse of all self-control.