John Powys - Ducdame

Lexie made a deprecatory grimace. “Not an illusion at all. That’s one of those tiresome metaphysical tricks you’re always indulging in. Besides, it doesn’t mean any very great separation. We usually come back to each other pretty quick, good luck or bad luck! Do you remember in old days how we used to set out for a bit of sport to Tollminster Great Fair? Have you forgotten those fields down by the river at Bishop’s Forley? Or those seats under the trees at Polberry Cross? You used to be much more excited than I was when we started off, after breakfast, on a fine August day. That’s just what you double-faced metaphysicians are always up to! You want to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. You want to call honest natural pleasure an illusion; and yet you’re more frantic to get hold of it than any one else!”

Rook sighed heavily. His brother’s words, bringing back the long summer days of that old, careless, irresponsible life, made him feel the full weight of all his present miseries. Oh, why couldn’t one separate altogether the spirit of adventure in these things from the wretched entanglements that come in their train? The outrageous notion came into his head of how lovely it would be if these irresistible beings, who allured him so, were as heartless and emotionless as that clouded-yellow butterfly whose flight he was now observing! Why couldn’t it have been arranged like that; emotion and attraction remaining absolutely distinct things? They were distinct in him! Why couldn’t they be distinct in everyone? And then, as the image of Netta’s face as she had turned toward him on that last day in their room rose up before his mind’s eye, he knew that all this chatter about sport and pleasure was a mere ruffling of the surface of reality. How could one even dream of girls being like clouded-yellow butterflies, when that single look, terrible and beautiful “as an army with banners,” in the face of one of them, was enough to take the taste out of all food and the sweetness out of all sunshine?

“Let’s walk once across the field before we do anything else,” he said sadly; and Lexie was far too sympathetic to the fitful moods of his brother, and far too sagacious, to utter a word of protest.

So, turning their backs to that blue water, they moved slowly side by side across the sunlit park land. The oaks were beginning to cast shadows now, short abrupt shadows, the hot shadows of an early summer afternoon, smelling of moss and the breath of cattle and of puff-ball funguses.

The horses, which Rook had passed earlier that day, stood crowded together in the shade; while the brown-and-white cows, beginning to grow restless at the approach of milking time, moved uneasily along the edge of the meadow palings, snuffing the air and lowing.

They crossed the whole expanse of the grass in silence, and when they reached the road Rook could see that Lexie showed signs of feeling his malady upon him. They sat down by the roadside under a beech tree, where the ground was covered with last year’s leaves and the scattered husks of beech mast. Here Lexie produced his little box and swallowed the last two tablets which it contained.

“I must have another,” he murmured. “He said I could take three.”

He dropped the empty box on the ground beside them and produced an unopened one from his pocket. Out of this, when he had broken its wrapper, he extracted one more tablet and swallowed it hurriedly.

“Let’s have a look!” cried Rook, taking the little box into his hands.

The strain of suffering passed very quickly out of the younger man’s face; as if his faith in the beneficent drug had the power of anticipating its chemical and physical effect.

“Ten of those little things,” he said, “would finish you off, Rook. I fancy it would need about fifteen to kill me, as I’ve become inured to it. Odd, isn’t it? Think now — how simple it would be for both of us to gulp them down, one after another; and then just to light our last cigarettes and make ourselves ready for Eternity. We’re in such a convenient place, too! Twiney would be bound to find us; and he could bundle us into the bottom of his cart as if we were venison. Nell would have to sit by his side with one foot on you and one foot on me. It would be quite a cortège - macabre. The whole village would turn out to see us go by. You know how the rumour of those things runs in front of the thing itself? ‘The brothers Ashover, furtively but blamelessly pursuing their last journey into their native domains.’ Can’t you hear how Hastings would describe it to his friend in Bishop’s Forley? Can’t you catch the unctuous clerical humour enhancing the taste of the well-baked tea cakes on some little tennis-lawn?”

Rook, who was holding the box tightly in his fingers, looked at his brother with a scowl. “I think it’s extremely wrong of Twickenham to let you have so many of these damned things! You might easily swallow them in your sleep; or even forget how many you’d taken and take an overdose. Really, Lexie; I mean what I say! It’s not right. I don’t like it. There! I’m cursed if I’ll give them back to you!” And he proceeded to put the box into his own pocket.

“Give me those tablets, Rook, or I shall get angry! You needn’t blame Twickenham. I only get the prescription from him. The chemist makes them up. He’s an old friend of mine. You don’t know him. He’s a great fisherman and we talk of flies. He knows me too well to be afraid that I shall take one tablet more than the right amount. And no one but you would ever dream of a person taking morphia tablets in his sleep. Give them back, Rook, or I shall get very angry with you, and that may finish me off!”

His face became so agitated that Rook did grow afraid as to the effect such excitement might have, and drawing out the box he laid it down on the grass by the side of the empty one.

At that moment Lexie struggled hurriedly to his feet. “There’s a White Admiral!” he cried in childish eagerness. And sure enough, clinging to a beech leaf on a bough that was just above their heads, its wings drawn back so that the translucent loveliness of their green-veined sides was revealed in full sunshine, swung this rare and exquisite butterfly.

Rook watched his brother standing there with his back to him, his arm extended and his hand moving slowly and tremblingly toward the unsuspecting creature, evidently, from its flawless freshness, just emerged from its chrysalis. How often had he surveyed in old days this familiar figure, stealing up toward some gorgeous hoverer, his whole being absorbed and rapt in the intensity of the chase.

There! Lexie had made his snatch at it, but the White Admiral had slipped away and was fanning its wings, wide-open now so that its proud black-and-white markings were distinctly visible, on another beech twig farther away.

Lexie moved toward it and once more stealthily lifted his hand.

It may have been that this familiar vision, redolent of old, sweet memories, brought to the elder brother’s mind, in one unbearable rush of bitter thought, the feeling that henceforth he no longer possessed his own independent identity; or it may have been that ever since he first saw Lexie with that little box, the idea had been vaguely stirring within him that it would be wise to have such a key to final escape safely in his keeping! Whichever way it was, just at the moment when Lexie was most absorbed, Rook quickly opened the full box, emptied about twenty of the tablets into the other one and thrust the two boxes into different pockets.

Among the many movements made by the animals and the birds in the environs of Comber’s End on that loveliest of midsummer days it was significant enough that the two most symbolic and expressive ones made by mortal men should have been a movement to capture one tremulous living creature and a movement to set free another; to capture a White Admiral butterfly, and to set free— hospes comesque corporis —a human soul, fooled to the top of its bent.