John Powys - Ducdame

He tried to imagine a world in which there were no women at all, or rather a world in which he himself had no dealings with women. Could he have lived, in harmonious and contented happiness, without any amorous dalliance? He remembered a certain day when someone or other, he forgot who the person was, had challenged him about his idleness, had suggested that to go on as the impoverished Squire of Ashover, doing nothing but walk and eat and sleep, was unworthy of a man with any spirit. He swung his stick into a bush of dogwood and chuckled aloud. God! he had intelligence enough to dispose of that indictment. What did it matter? The world was full enough of “honourable men” struggling frantically to get the advantage of one another in this race for success, for fame, for recognition, for achievement. What did it matter? Better, far better, to live harmlessly in some quiet untroubled place, watching season follow season, month follow month, aloof and detached; leaving the breathless procession of outward events to turn and twist upon itself like a wounded snake!

What did it matter? There was no “great Task-master” in the invisible world waiting to fall upon him with upbraidings and penalties. The opinions of his tribe, of his class, of the human race itself — what did they really amount to? His account was with the universe that had tossed him forth and that would receive him again. No! he could sink back deep enough into his own nature to let accusations of that kind fall harmless about him. It was not in that direction that his mistake lay. His mistake lay in not recognizing that unless a man has the stomach of a pirate it is better to give these tempting brigs and brigantines a wide berth; better to sail the high seas without meddling with any of them!

If only he had found out how fatally Nature had mingled the elements in him before he committed himself to Netta or Nell or Ann! This blending of an irresistible attraction to the feminine body and mind, with an absolute lack of emotional passion, was nothing less than a monstrous deformity! What kind of a heart had he, when he could find it in him to wish that he had never set eyes on any one of the three? His instincts were not perverted. They were only so capricious and elusive, so bloodless and non-human, that they flitted over the flower beds of life very much as those little blue butterflies he was watching now flitted from that patch of St. John’s-wort to that patch of hawk-weed!

He began to walk more slowly and driftingly along that interminable lane. He felt as if he had already been following it for half a day; and it still stretched straight in front of him, without any sign of an end or of a turning. It seemed to melt into that leafy horizon as the moon-path across the sea on a moonlit night dips down over the rim of the world.

He felt utterly weary of himself and his familiar destiny. Yet he found it impossible even to conceive of any other. The idea of leaving Ashover and starting life afresh with any new ambition was as far from what his energy could compass as for a perch in Saunders’ Hole to turn into one of the swallows that skimmed its surface.

What he craved, with all the desperation of a fox caught by wire netting in a fowl run, was just to be free; free, to enjoy precisely such an excursion with Lexie as this one was, without feeling a dull throb in his secret conscience, like the throb of a malignant growth in the pit of his stomach!

He stopped for a while, leaning over a gate and gazing into the green slime of a cattle-trodden ditch, across which three orange-bodied dragon-flies were darting with as much arrogance as if it were a Venetian lagoon.

He had a feeling that some deep inarticulate grievance, much less clearly defined than these other causes of misery, was obscurely stirring within him. He tried to plumb the recesses of this emotion and he came to the conclusion that it was a blind repulsion at the idea of being married to Lady Ann. He suddenly found himself actually trembling with a convulsive fit of anger against his wife; and not only against his wife. It was as if he had never realized before how profoundly his life illusion was outraged by his marriage. The thought that he was irretrievably committed to this brilliant high-handed companion; the thought that his life was no longer to be a series of sweet solitary sensations, but a thing which was only half his own, stripped the magic from earth and air and sky!

And this was a trick that had been played upon him by a subtle conspiracy of all the persons in his entourage. His mother and Lady Ann had plotted for it. Netta had sacrificed herself for it. Nell had accepted it and condoned it. And most of all, that indestructible and accursed entity, the House of Ashover itself, had pushed him into it with urgent, unwearied, importunate hands, all the more powerful because they were invisible!

His mind began running up and down the events of his life. He had drifted into this cul-de-sac in a sort of anæsthetized trance. Something vety deep in his nature had always preserved an absurd faith in his power of extricating himself from any trap. This faith no doubt depended on his emotional detachment; on those remote translunar journeys of his mind that seemed to reduce all human relations into a misty puppet show, seen through the smaller end of a telescope!

He cast about in his brain until his mind trailed its wings and sank huddled and drooping from sheer exhaustion in the attempt to find some outlet from his dilemma.

To and fro those orange-bodied dragon-flies darted. To and fro across the oozing footprints of the cattle, between great heaps of dung, clouds of infinitesimal midgets hovered and wavered; while in a corner of clear water a group of tiny black water beetles whirled round and round, as if they were trying to outpace their own small shadows which answered to their movement, down there on the sunlit mud, in queer radiated circles like little dark-rimmed moons.

The peculiar nature of Rook’s intelligence did not permit him the pragmatic refuge of some drastic change in his system of life. His soul wilted and sagged but he felt no energy to cry: “Hold … enough!” to the cohorts of chance; or to deify them with ethical nicknames.

That the universe could be envisaged as a place where human characters were hammered and chiselled into some premeditated mould of valour or resignation never so much as crossed the threshold of his consciousness. His vision of things would go on to the very end drawing its quality from just such vignettes of the ways of nature as he was staring at at that moment — those casual heaps of cattle dung, those dancing midges, that green pond slime, those revolving jet-bright beetles!

He was sick and weary with the effort of thinking; of thinking round, and round in the same circle. He was like a hunted gladiator who, in his blind race for life, keeps seeing the same impassive faces looking down upon the same heart-breaking circuit of the arena.

At that particular moment it began to dawn upon him that this numb, paralyzed, gray, horizonless state was worse, in the kind of misery it produced, than his furious self-accusations about Netta.

It was not the Netta trouble that was hurting him the deepest now, it was his reaction to his marriage; a reaction that seemed to menace the very essence of his identity, an essence that had winced and squirmed under the whip of his remorse but after all had been there , intact and integral in the darkness; there for good or for evil!

But his marriage seemed in some mysterious way to invade this precious untouchable essence, to swamp it, to blur it, to destroy its outlines. The truth was that the peculiar “formula” or illusory “symbol” of his especial kind of sensuality had always implied a very definite relation between himself and the object of its attraction, a relation according to which it was necessary for him to feel himself entirely independent and detached from the other person; necessary, in fact, that he should feel himself to be stronger, more formidable, more integrated than this other.