John Powys - Ducdame

The ultimate duplicity of the universe, whether it were logical or phantasmagorical, had at least given him one way of crying an incontestable “checkmate!” to the Squire of Ashover.

THE last day of June found most of the Frome-side hay fields cut and carried. Not only so, but the newly sprouting grass in nearly all of these peaceful enclosures had begun to assume that peculiarly rich shade of green, deeper than the first spring verdure and in a certain sense even fresher, by reason of the fact that at the earlier season the new shoots are surrounded by so many of the old winter-bleached blades and stalks, whereas, at this great midsummer solstice, between the time of the rains and the time of the coming of the roses, the mowing machines have made a clear field for that vivid aftermath.

The wild roses were out already, and in their glory; so were the cream-yellow clusters of honeysuckle; so also the firstborn of the foxgloves. Field orchids and bird’s-foot trefoil were taking the place of daisies and cowslips; and down in the water meadows ragged robin and marsh-woundwort were lifting their heads amid the innumerable spear points of the new-grown rushes.

Dragon-flies began to appear in greater numbers over the rain-filled cattle ponds and along the ditches; the most common kind being those whose bodies were as blue as kingfishers and their wings like quivering fans of quicksilver chequered with powdered jet dust.

All through that month, through the earlier days of sunshine and through the later days of turbulent rains, Rook had sullenly been groping in his mind for some clue to the almost triumphant malice with which Hastings treated him now whenever they met. He found it difficult to believe that it was simply due to jealousy over Nell; for of late he had hardly seen anything of the girl and when they did meet it was under conditions to which the most jealous husband could hardly take exception.

The fact that his absorbing remorse about Netta had destroyed all desire within him for other women produced the illusion in his mind that he was isolated, cut off, marooned and under a sort of curse. To himself he seemed a moral leper, doomed to produce unhappiness wherever he went or whatever he did; and so, as often happens with egoists of his kind, he took it for granted that others saw him exactly as he saw himself.

That it never occurred to him that he might be paying the penalty now for earlier irresponsibilities was due to the fact that in those first days of his encounters with Nell, Hastings had seemed so entirely removed from all mundane or human emotions. The man had not been exactly what the old books used to call a “wittold”; but he had certainly produced the impression that no romance in which his wife chose to be involved was likely to worry him very much. But all that was completely changed! He felt as if Hastings were watching him with the eye of a malignant raven; and though his own sensuality was as dead in him, just then, as if he had been swimming among icebergs, it was an intensification of his self-condemned loneliness not to have the balm of Nell’s sympathy.

This last day of the month was a day of days. It was one of those sequences of twenty-four hours that seem in some way detached and isolated from the rest of the season. There was a mild steady wind blowing from the southwest, a wind that in its journey across the orchards and dairies of the west country seemed to have gathered up the sharp taste of green apples and of green corn, and to have mingled this more astringent essence with the rain-scented breath of heavy-uddered cattle and with the sweetness of old-fashioned rows of pinks in hot sunny borders, between brick paths and box hedges.

By one of those earth-obsessed intuitions which his growing malady seemed to render more intense and clarified every day, Lexie had predicted the occurrence of this halcyon weather and had arranged to have himself driven out by Mr. Twiney to a place called Comber’s End, which lay on the farther side of the great stretch of water brooks and meadows on the edge of which the village of Ashover stood.

Comber’s End itself was hardly a hamlet; its chief peculiarity being an old manorial farmhouse surrounded by a large pond or small lake, of considerable depth, at one extremity of which was an ancient water mill.

Rook was to meet his brother at the spot and they were to lunch together there, Lexie bringing the meal with him carefully packed in a basket by Mrs. Bellamy.

There was no road of any kind directly across the marshes. The best toad for driving round them was several miles east of the village, while the way Rook had selected to walk, following narrower and rougher lanes, was nearly as far as that in the western direction.

It was indeed down a narrow grassy road that he found himself walking, in the mid-hours of that unusual morning, with the larks singing above his head, the warblers chattering in the hedges, and the lane itself stretching away in front of him, a long straight line of narrowing perspective bordered by pollard willows. He felt wearily, hopelessly sad, as he walked along, switching aimlessly with his stick the dock leaves and hemlock plants and rousing from their noon siesta, now a long-legged heron, and now a green snake, while the far-travelled wind rustling through the alders and the guelder bushes seemed to him like a trailing army of defeated sighs; sighs that died upon the air, one after another, and were replaced, one after another, by new fugitives from new fields of remote disaster.

Rook would have felt less sad if he could have regarded the impasse in which he was caught as a matter of blind destiny. The poison that rankled in him came from the thought that he could have escaped from the whole thing if only he had been sensible as Lexie was sensible, and had not just run headlong upon the shoals, like a ship with a mad pilot.

He felt responsible at that moment for the unhappiness of all the lives within his reach. His mother alone was free from the curse that seemed to have fallen upon him; his mother, and perhaps his unborn child. Even his love for Netta was not so much a craving for Netta’s society as a wretched remorse at being the cause of her disappearance.

He examined his heart as he went along; and it was borne in upon him that he never had really, in all his life, loved a single human being except his brother. And now his brother was dying.

As he stared at the long lines of pollard willows on either side of the lane, their grotesque trunks, topped by what looked like thick upstanding panic-stricken hairs, became to him a silent avenue of Rook Ashovers, each of them born without a heart and each of them awaiting some kind of retributive judgment day! He wished he could walk along that road for ever and ever; or that, by walking along it till his knees tottered and his soul was sick to death, he might do penance for the misery he had caused.

He saw life at that moment in a different light from any that he had seen it in before. He saw it as a place where not to have become involved in any other existence was the only cause for real thankfulness to the gods; in any other existence than such as was organically linked with his own. For his relation with Lexie had brought only happiness to them both. So had his relation with his mother until she had imbibed this mania about his marriage.

The rest was all misery! Netta he had disappointed and thrown aside. Nell he had tantalized and thrown aside. Ann he had provoked and humiliated beyond the point of forgiveness. What was there about him that made any intimate association with a woman dangerous and fatal? Not simply his selfishness. Plenty of selfish men enjoyed, after their fashion, eminently successful lives with the girls of their choice. There was something about himself, something about his kind of selfishness, that was as deadly to his happiness with these sensitive creatures as was catsbane to cats or wolfsbane to wolves!