John Powys - Ducdame

Under conditions of that kind, with every nuance of this “formula” satisfied, he could be tender, pitiful, and even clairvoyant; as he had been, almost to the last, in his feeling about Netta; but when this “formula,” this symbolic projection of the realistic fact reflected in the distorting lens of his mind, was broken up by a differently adjusted balance of relations, in place of tenderness he was liable to feel a blind hostility, and in place of pity a cold-blooded vindictive malice.

His “love-making” with Cousin Ann had always been of a very light and a very superficial sort, from his side of the encounter; just because the strength of her nature precluded that protective or possessive thrill which his vice demanded; and now that he found himself actually married to her, nothing that her brilliance or her beauty or her grand manner could achieve gave him the faintest sensual pleasure.

Rook’s was the kind of nature that derives no satisfaction from sensual emotion unless it is at liberty to disparage rather than to idealize; to pity rather than to admire; to possess rather than be possessed; and in every one of these requisites he was outraged and frustrated by his marriage with his cousin.

What he really required of life was not an impassioned love with an equal mate, but certain faint, vague, elusive ecstasies that were entirely unspiritual, entirely unemotional, and entirely de-personalized. Women were to him not human souls to be loved for themselves but just vibrant quivering telegraph wires, from which, as they stretched across land and river and hill in their long mysterious reach, the rain-scented winds of night and morning drew magical hummings and whisperings and wild sad prophecies!

Rook had never possessed any sense of proportion; and he was especially liable to let his moods become manias when they were associated with anything physiological. At that moment he got the sensation that his brain was going to burst like the seeds of a gorse-bush in hot weather, as he contemplated those jet-black beetles revolving in their unwearied circles.

He felt as if Lady Ann’s personality were actually adhering to his own; and not only adhering to it, but sucking it up; as a whirlpool might suck up a paper boat!

His imagination got more and more unbalanced; ran riot more and more wildly; as he thought of himself in relation to this cousin-wife. He began to feel as if from henceforth to the day of his death he were destined to be deprived of all separate individual reality, destined to become a mere husk or shell, in the centre of which was nothing that could assert itself, or sink down into itself, but only something that had to reflect, reflect, reflect the thoughts of a completely alien person.

He felt as though this female creature, to whom he was now so indissolubly linked, were some sinister living growth, fungus-like and carnivorous, that devoured his flesh and drank his blood; something that it would be necessary to cut away from his inmost bones before he could breathe freely or take any natural pleasure in life again.

The feeling grew and grew upon him, as he stared at that stagnant pond; till it seemed as if some actual magnetic power were menacing him with suffocation! And then, all in a moment, he found himself continuing his slow progress along that interminable pollard-bordered road.

For some reason or other connected with the tension in his brain, the hedges ceased to be green under that halcyon sky. They became gray, like the colour of wood-ashes. The trunks of the willows, too, became gray; and the lane itself under his feet, its deep clay-stiffened cart ruts and its margins of silverweed and feverfew, became gray as the face of some enormous dead creature upon which he was treading.

A paralysis of dizziness seized him, mingled with an abysmal loathing for he knew not what. He staggered as he walked and he found himself feebly shaking his head as if to make some overt protestation against a vision of things that his reason still assured him was unreal.

And then it was that a rider, mounted upon a tall gray horse, came cantering toward him and, pulling up when he reached him, turned his horse round and proceeded to ride by his side along the lane, talking to him as he rode. The horseman was a young man of singularly prepossessing appearance, and as he bent down over the animal’s neck to bring his face nearer to the pedestrian, Rook received a vivid impression that something which had happened to him before was now going to happen again and in exactly the same way.

He was not in the least surprised to detect in his companion’s face a certain unmistakable resemblance to his own, nor was he startled or in any way shocked when the youth addressed him as “Father.”

“It is just dizziness,” Rook found himself saying. “It has nothing to do with what I have been suffering.”

“You must not suffer, Father,” the youth said gently, stroking his horse’s neck with a light hand.

“I thought just now,” Rook retorted, “that there was no human being in the world unhappier than I am.”

“Why are you unhappy, Daddy?” enquired the youthful rider.

“It’s an indescribable horror,” Rook answered. “Something that a lad like you had better not try to think about. I myself could hardly put it into words. But the effect it has upon me I could describe; only that would make you as miserable as I am.”

He placed his hand on the edge of the rider’s saddle and the boy laid his own upon it and began caressing it.

“There’s no need for you to tell me, Daddy,” he murmured. His voice became so low and faint just then that Rook glanced at him anxiously. And it was not only that his voice seemed to sink away like a wind that sighed itself into silence among feebly stirred grasses. His very form and face grew shadowy and indistinct.

Rook was conscious of making a quick desperate effort to hold both horse and rider near his side. He had the sense of clinging tenaciously to something that was falling back into fathoms of water. The very silence into which the boy’s voice sank, the grayness into which his form dwindled and receded, seemed to be broken and troubled by a confused medley of hummings and murmurings, obscure, indistinct, unintelligible to the man’s ears.

“I thought just now,” Rook went on, holding tightly to the edge of the rider’s saddle, “that there was no one in the world more cowardly, more contemptible than I am; no one in the world more treacherous, lecherous, and mean-hearted! And then I saw that the green slime was the green slime, that the cattle dung was the cattle dung; and it came into my head that a man has to accept himself for what he is; or if he can’t do that just kill himself and end it!”

Kill himself and end it! The words seemed to drift away, over the flanks of the horse and over the pollard willows, as if they possessed some palpable body of their own that could not dissolve at once into the air. Rook heard them floating across the fields. Why didn’t they sink into that mass of grayness that now began suffocating him again?

He made a convulsive clutch at his companion’s fingers, and once more that fresh, fair youthful face leaned down close to his own.

“It must be the boy from Comber’s End,” he wanted to say to himself; but in place of saying “Comber’s End” the word “Ashover” came into his mind.

And then again it seemed inevitable and natural that the youth should be murmuring: “It’s all right, Daddy; it’s absolutely all right.”

“I must tell him about the green slime,” Rook thought insistently. “I must make it clear to him about the cattle dung.”

“There’s a heron over there, Daddy,” said the young horseman quietly, “and it hasn’t a gray feather on it.”