John Powys - Ducdame

For some reason or other the sense of a heron having nothing gray, not one single feather of gray about it filled Rook with indescribable relief.

“Can it fly?” he whispered.

But the boy was silent again and once more both horse and rider seemed to recede and recede into an enveloping mist. Frantically Rook clung to those youthful fingers, and as he clung to them they grew warm and firm again under his touch

“It was the green slime,” the man began again, in a hurried husky voice, his brain full of the one obstinate desire to make a very difficult point clear. “And the cattle dung,” he added, pressing the horseman’s hand against his saddle.

“What they made me think was that no one who makes any effort to change his nature or to change any one else’s nature has any right to be alive upon the earth.” His voice subsided but he was still driven on by that desperate impatient sense that he must make everything plain before the lad cantered off.

“Slime — dung — not one gray feather—” he gasped wildly; and then, in a sudden burst of exultant freedom: “No one is worthy to live,” he cried with a loud voice, “who doesn’t know — who doesn’t know—”

“What, Daddy?” whispered the voice at his side.

He flung the words into the air now with a ringing triumphant voice.

“Who doesn’t know that all Life asks of us is to be recognized and loved!”

The young rider suddenly snatched up the hand with which Rook had been so desperately retaining him and raised it to his lips. Then he gave him a smile the penetrating sweetness of which diffused itself through every fibre of the man’s body.

“Good-bye, Daddy!” he murmured gently; and whispering some quick word to his horse he gave the bridle a shake and cantered away down the lane.

The sound of the retreating horse hooves subsided slowly into silence. The boy’s face, so unmistakably resembling his own but with a beauty and power in it beyond anything he had ever approached, remained in his mind as an ineffaceable reality!

“Recognized and loved,” he muttered; and there arose within him the feeling that it was for the creation of a being like this that all the suffering he had caused and all the horror he had endured found their solution. It was toward this that the invincible life purpose, reaching out from the buried dust of his ancestors to him, had been pushing him blindly forward, tearing a path for it, clearing a way for it, through all his confusions and calamities!

The rider’s figure was out of sight, however, now; and the beat of his horse’s hooves was quite silent. The feeling which had arisen from some subconscious recess in the man’s nature died down with their vanishing. Rook surveyed the empty road in front of him with a vague, incredulous smile. Then he shook his head in the same feeble protesting manner as he had done before.

“Rook Ashover, you must look to your wits!” he muttered; and he struck at a tall patch of hog weed out of which fluttered a tortoise-shell butterfly.

All sorts of quite irrelevant and even ridiculous things came into his mind. He remembered a wooden sword that he had played with as a child and he saw distinctly the gray dilapidated mane of a hobbyhorse he used to ride. Then there came suddenly into his head the word “Gorm,” written upon a ghostly signpost.

“That boy must be the boy from Comber’s End,” he repeated mechanically. But as soon as he had formulated the words he remembered that it was when he himself was a boy that he used to meet the farmer’s son of that remote manor house.

The face of the countryside had retaken its natural colour from him now. The appalling grayness which had so mysteriously fallen upon it had completely vanished.

“I must have worried myself into some sort of fit,” he thought. “I wonder if I fell down just now and have been lying on the road, as Mother used to say I did when I was a boy. God! I must be a bit more careful how I let my thoughts run away with me! I wonder if someone on horseback did pass me by, or pick me up? But what on earth could I have said to the chap? He must have thought I was drunk. God! I must have seemed perfectly mad to him! I talked to him as if he were Ann’s child grown into a man. And he talked to me like that.”

He pulled his hat down over his head and walked steadily forward, puzzled and disturbed. He could see the end of the lane now, about a quarter of a mile in front of him. It merged itself in a broad highway, the famous Roman road between Salisbury and Exeter, and at the point where it met the road stood a copse of larches, incredibly fresh and green against the southern sky.

Rook continued to review with a sullen puzzled obstinacy his recent experience. What annoyed him was that he kept seeing that green slime and those trodden cattle droppings; and then completely losing the thread of everything. Had he fainted there by the pond and just dreamed about the rest? But when he came to his senses he was out of sight of the pond. He must have got up and walked on, still in a state of unconsciousness! He had heard of people doing that kind of thing. What did they call it? Amnesia. Well! He must stop letting his thoughts run on into these wretched manias. He had been worrying himself too much. Marriage? Well! Other men had made fools of themselves before, without falling into these morbid spasms of horror. Was he, deep down in his subconscious nerves, twisted in some way, unnatural, abnormal, without the ordinary masculine feelings about women? He knew that the excitement with which he was now hurrying to Comber’s End was something beyond any emotion he had ever felt in awaiting a rendezvous with a woman.

Was that fainting-fit into which he had fallen just a mental reaction from some deep shock of physical aversion connected with his marriage to his cousin?

He stood quite still under the green clump of larches and pondered on this with a scowling brow.

What nonsense! He remembered how wonderful and lovely that night in Drools’ cottage had been. Was it nothing but the heady fumes of that rich Dorchester ale, nothing but the sorcery of those snow-burdened midnight spaces, that had cast such a glamour over that encounter? Was he, down deep below all his love affairs, an indurated, an incorrigible misogynist? He shuddered a little as the memory of the nausea through which he had passed reapproached the threshold of his consciousness. He shook it off with a jerk of his head and a wave of his stick; and started at a swinging, resolute stride, northward, along the highway.

“I’m tough enough to survive these shocks,” he thought to himself; “and I can drink my draught of Lethe and forget them all.”

He looked around him now with a return of his natural de-personalized passion for that perpetually changing face of the Frome valley.

“Forget them all,” he repeated to himself: and out of the depths of his soul he uttered a kind of inarticulate prayer to those green pastures, to those leafy woods, to those sailing clouds, that he might remain to the end their unperturbed, unaffrighted votary!

After a quarter of an hour’s walking along the Roman road he came to a lane on his right which was as thickly overgrown with summer grass as if it had been a narrow elongated meadow. “To Comber’s End” said the signpost at the corner; and Rook hastened down this propitious avenue of greenness with a nearer approximation to a light heart than he had known for many a long day.

After following the lane’s winding course for some twenty minutes and getting, as it seemed, deeper and deeper into a maze of ancient orchards and dark-stemmed covers he came to a place where his path widened out into a kind of miniature parkland.

Acres of velvety grass dotted with thick-trunked oak trees lay spread out before him in the hot, shadowless noon sunshine, with a herd of brown-and-white cattle feeding on one side of it and a group of horses lying asleep on the other.