John Powys - Ducdame

What would he do, how could he endure his life, when this brother of his had been driven from his last stronghold, from the bifurcated branch of Ygdrasil, the World Ash tree, and had slipped into a lake deeper than that of Comber’s End?

IT WAS under the heavy green of a midsummer chestnut tree, of all trees the one which takes to itself most completely the character of that umbrageous season, of that interlude in the year’s progression, when the “primal burst” is over and the yellows and purples of the August efflorescence are still unbudded, that Rook and Lexie unpacked Mrs. Bellamy’s basket and enjoyed the culminating hour of their fête-champêtre.

The chestnut’s branches, with their huge, somnolent leafy fingers hovering above them like an indulgent episcopal benediction, stretched out over the smoothly running brook which fed the water mill at the eastern extremity of the lake. Here Rook ate his meal, seated with his back against the trunk of the tree; while his brother, with that invincible desire to give every passing moment some additional heightening, which the fatality of his illness had begun to accentuate to a point of actual recklessness, had succeeded in balancing himself on one of the great motionless spokes, covered now with moss and ferns, that in former times used to turn the machinery of the mill.

The younger Ashover had finished his lunch — his taste for food was growing steadily more capricious and fastidious — and was now smoking one cigarette after another, as he sat hunched up there above the stream with his knees beneath his chin.

“I hope that wheel won’t suddenly begin to turn,” said Rook. “How does it manage to stay still with the water flowing on underneath it?”

“It’s not really flowing,” said the other. “To make it come with a proper rush, strong enough to move the wheel, they’d have to lift up some dam on the other side.”

They both remained silent, listening to the monotonous ripple of the little brook as it eddied and gurgled round the stones in its shallow bed.

“There’s a trout!” cried Lexie suddenly. “Did you see it? It went under that green stone. Do you remember how we used to catch them in a butterfly net by damming up the pools under the bank?”

Rook shook his head. “I’d forgotten that,” he said. “But I remember how you always used to say that a fresh-caught trout, lying stone dead in a handful of grass, was one of the objects a person would remember most vividly if he had been transported to a different planet and was trying to recall the most characteristic and delicious things in his old earth life. The look of those silvery scales and purple spots, with the little bits of bright-green grass sticking to them, was only rivalled by one other thing in the world you used to say.”

“What was that?” enquired Lexie.

“The smell of the inside of a pea’s pod when you’ve just shred the peas?” pondered Rook gravely. “Or the smell of one of those squares of fresh turf in a wheelbarrow when someone’s making a new lawn; or the smell of honeysuckle, when it’s very yellow and a little faded? No! I don’t believe it was the smell of anything! What was it that you used to put second to the trout?”

He mused for a minute or two in a silence that was full of the faint ripple of the stream and of the distant murmur of wood pigeons.

“I know!” he cried eagerly. “No; it wasn’t a smell. It was the look of silverweeds, all covered with white dust, at the edge of a road that’s just going over a hill from which you can see the sea!”

Lexie stared at him from his precarious seat on the mill wheel with a strange, intent absorption; an absorption so deep that Rook became aware that his mind had wandered away from their conversation. His eyes as he stared grew larger and more wistful, and the elder brother became uneasy and in some way put to shame by their expression.

There came over him, as he met their unseeing gaze, a sensation of the most heartbreaking sadness; that sort of sadness which comes upon us when in the middle of some hot cornfield, between the singing of larks and the hum of the cutting machine, between yellow stalks and red poppies, we hear the tolling of the village bell and think of the raw, open oblong hole in that crowded enclosure and of the white surplice of the priest!

“I’m getting stiff sitting here,” said Lexie breaking the spell. “Give me your stick a moment.”

Rook held out to him the end of his stick and his brother pulled himself up by its assistance and jumped upon the bank. Here he lay down upon the sun-flecked moss, his head against the other’s knees. Rook ran his fingers over the embossed corrugations and deep-dented furrows of the younger man’s heavy forehead.

“I wish to the devil,” he said abruptly, “that you and I were quite alone in the world! Think what it would be like,” he went on, “if this evening I were coming back with you to Marsh Alley, and there were no one in Ashover House except complete strangers! Mrs. Bellamy could look after us both perfectly well; and we’d have nothing to think of — no worries, no responsibilities! — nothing but just to read and talk and walk and watch the changes of the weather.”

“You might have done it if you’d really wanted to,” said Lexie.

Rook’s hand left his brother’s forehead and made an impatient clutch at the moss and the dry rubble.

“That’s a cruel thing to say; and you know very well it’s a silly thing, too. I couldn’t have left Mother alone. I might as well say to you that if you’d really wanted us to live together you’d have never gone off to Marsh Alley at all.”

Lexie shifted his position a little so as to get his face into the sunshine.

“How could I live in that house with you and the old man cursing each other all day long? It was you who begged me to go off, so that we should have a place where we could be at peace!”

“Then why did you talk just now about my leaving Ashover and living with you? We did practically live together in those days. I was always coming over to you. You know I was, Lexie.”

The younger man’s tone softened. “I know it, Rook, I know it. It’s only been this last year, since you brought your girl here, that we’ve been really separated. Why did you do it, Rook? Why did you do it?”

“I wish to the devil I hadn’t done it!” cried the other fiercely. “It was only that that made Mother bring Ann here; and if she hadn’t come, we might have been just as we were!”

“You’d have got some other girl; or I should,” said Lexie. “No, it’s no use blaming each other. It’s all natural enough.”

“It isn’t natural,” shouted Rook; and Lexie, though he couldn’t see Rook’s face, was only too well aware of the quivering and tightening of his upper lip and the protrusion of a vein in his forehead.

“It’s a monstrous mania, this obsession we both have for young girls! It’s inherited from the old man; just as he inherited it from his father! It was a beautiful piece of irony, just worthy of the way things work out, that it was Grandfather’s bastard who landed me with Ann. And then the trouble I’ve had with Betsy; and with Nancy’s luckless progeny! I tell you it’s a monstrous obsession; that’s what it is!” Lexie got up and sat in a pool of flickering golden sunshine, hugging his knees.

“I cannot understand,” he said, “how you can be what you are, with flashes of noble insight such as you have, and then fall back like this. When you talk as you’ve just been talking I feel only one thing for you, brother Rook.”

“What thing?” enquired the other in a more normal tone.