John Powys - Ducdame

The scene had that peculiar monumental quality under the cloudless sun, such as does not often, even in the most privileged localities, arrest the traveller’s attention. It struck Rook now as if it came to him with the weight of a whole series of complicated human impressions behind it. It seemed to summon him forth, as it must have summoned his ancestors before him, out of the cluttered distractions of the passing hour into some larger, nobler world, some world that lay all the while only just behind the familiar, the taken-for-granted, the common undistinguished face of crude reality!

He crossed the grass with a happy liberated step; passed close to the sleeping horses whose huge and sprawling abandonment had something so naked, so animal about it — their legs and hooves protruded so shamelessly from their round bellies! — that he felt as if he were some shadowy supernumerary come to life in the rich canvas of a Tintoretto or a Titian; one of those carelessly sketched anonymous figures whose business it is to stare modestly and self-effacingly at some great mythopœic event whose “persons” are gods and beasts and heroes.

Passing down an avenue of chestnut trees, whose branches made a flickering catafalque over his head, he came to the edge of the little lake on the farther side of which the Comber’s End manor house stood.

The place was as majestic and undisturbed as if the centuries had passed over it like a flock of wild geese dropping nothing but a few gray feathers to mark their flight.

The kitchen garden of the manor farm was surrounded by a high brick wall, the eastern side of which abutted upon the lake, leaving only a narrow footpath, overgrown with tangled vegetation, between it and the actual water.

Rook, as he saw all this, was suddenly almost glad that he had not come bolt upon his brother! That peculiar thrill, unlike anything else in the world, that trembles through us when, quite alone, we arrive suddenly upon a scene that answers to our deepest æsthetic exigencies is quickly dissipated by the neighbourhood of even the most friendly alien personality.

It establishes itself, this feeling, as if it were a furtive, intimate understanding between ourselves and whatever scene it may be answers to our craving.

And such moments have another, a yet more subtle value; namely, their power of linking themselves up in some mysterious way with all the other past moments of a similar nature that we have passed through in the course of our life. Toward these other moments the present one seems to gravitate by a natural affinity, taking its place among them and establishing itself among them, in such a way as to draw them out more clearly, more definitely, from their hidden retreats, and to make us more vividly aware of them.

It is then that we become conscious that in addition to the ordinary gregarious human life, led by us in contact with others and in the stress of our normal pursuits, there is another, a more intimate life, solitary and detached, that has its own days and months and years, such as are numbered by no measurings of common time, by no computation on any terrestrial almanac.

Underneath the procession of our normal days the visions of these solitary moments mingle and flow, making the dust and noise of the overt drama of our life seem crude and vulgar in comparison. They have nothing to do with the emotional or with the rational processes of our nature, these moments of vision. They are purely æsthetic. Yet they are not æsthetic in the sense of being entirely preoccupied with what is usually called beauty. The more definite and more suggestive word “magic” indicates better the quality to which they respond. For “magic” can be felt, both in landscapes and in other places, where there are few elements of those high mysterious values which we associate with the beautiful.

As Rook stood now on the edge of Comber’s End Pond and watched the moor hens and coots and wild ducks floating upon water that was the colour of lapis-lazuli, it was not the beauty of the scene that carried his consciousnes down that strange interior river, under ancient bridges and by hushed gardens, past shadowy terraces and turreted towers, past lonely towpaths and long-stretching melancholy roads! It was something that might easily have worked its charm upon him had the place lacked almost all the gracious beauty it possessed; had it been no more than a couple of stunted pine trees staring down upon the raw edges of a deserted quarry!

Rook’s own particular response to the accidental groupings of scenery was something that implied sometimes a vindictive malice against the richer forms of loveliness and an obstinate sullen preference for things that were abject, woebegone, god-forsaken. Thus were certain peculiar characteristics in his erotic life transferred to his æsthetic life; and the misery of his yearning to comfort the unhappy Netta found itself balanced by his malignant reaction from the brilliant Ann.

Suddenly to his immense astonishment he caught sight of his brother where least of all he had expected to find him; and as he chuckled to himself and waved his stick in the air he became for a moment a completely different human being.

Gone were all his dark manias and phobias. Gone were all the mystic ecstasies of his secretive personal life. In one great wave of joyous rejuvenation he became a boy again with the companion of his boyhood!

An aspen poplar, blighted by some long-forgotten thunderstorm, stretched a great dead leafless branch, bifurcated in the centre, right over the surface of the lake. Out upon this perilous projection the reckless invalid had managed to climb; and there he lay, in serene and triumphant complacency, his Cæsarean head propped against the blackened trunk and his thin bare legs dabbling in the water. He had been there all the while, watching Rook with a whimsical amusement, and all he did now, when his elder brother walked over to his retreat, was to greet him with such a satiric grimace that Rook felt the same disturbed boyish embarrassment that he used to feel in the very old days when Lexie took him to task for some piece of egoistic priggishness which he had hoped had passed unnoticed by that cynical eye.

“You don’t expect me to join you out there, I hope,” said the elder Ashover, regarding his brother’s position with some apprehension. “What have you done with poor Twiney and his cart?”

Lexie’s only reply to this was to make a second grimace which crumpled up his classical countenance till it resembled one of those goblinish tailpieces with which 18th-century publishers used to adorn their more decorative quartos.

“Don’t you worry about your lunch before the moment I’ve arranged for it, brother Rook,” he remarked after a moment of silence; during which Rook seated himself upon the bank at the foot of the tree. “The amazing thing is that I’ve managed to get you here at all considering the way you’ve treated me these last weeks.”

“Ay? What’s that? Oh, you mean that I’ve been more often to Toll-Pike than to your place? What nonsense! I haven’t seen Nell for the last fortnight and we’ve been together twice — no, three times! — in that time.”

Lexie settled himself more comfortably in his seat, drew out of his pocket a small cardboard box, rattled it vigorously, opened it, shook the contents into the palm of his hand, and conveying it from there to his mouth, swallowed it at a gulp.

“What’s that?” enquired Rook, lighting a cigarette and stretching out his legs in luxurious contentment.

“Morphia tablets,” replied his brother with ironic brevity.

There was a touch of bitterness, of faint reproach even, in the tone with which those two sinister words were uttered, which Rook did not miss.

The two men looked for a moment into each other’s eyes. Rook was the first to remove his gaze; and as he turned it upon the sunlit waters of that great placid pond that he and Lexie had visited together from their earliest childhood, a sharp pang, different in its nature from any he had been feeling before, went through his heart.