John Powys - Ducdame

JULY passed and August came. The halcyon weather of the Comber’s End day had not lasted very long. The latter half of July was gusty and cold. In many of the cornfields the wheat lay prostrate, beaten down and rain-sodden; while the hedge flowers, such as knapweed and scabious and ragwort, had that look of overweighted overgreen foliage and undersized rain-blighted blossoms such as indicates the absence of long hours of uninterrupted sunshine.

But with the coming of August all this changed. The prostrate corn lifted itself up a little. The roads grew dusty. The fairy rings on Battlefield turned pale green; the turf around them became bleached and yellowish; while the taller grasses at the edges of the fields assumed that shade of old mellow gold which answered to the ripening of the grain at their side.

The effect of the preceding stormy weather had been to produce an anticipation of autumn in certain aspects of that harvest season, in others to retard the autumn’s approach with a kind of second midsummer. It was only on the higher uplands and on the slopes of the hills, where the soil was lighter and more gravelly, that the grass embrowned itself and lost its sap. In the valleys it remained moist, even after many long, hot days; and though groups of trees, here and there, that had been exposed to the rains and winds carried signs of their ill-usage, the more protected ones, in the depths of the Antiger Woods, for instance, were as richly green still as in the early days of June.

But a week of hot sun and sultry twilights soon manifested its effects. All along the banks of the Frome great spikes of purple loosestrife alternated with the ragged clumps of hemp agrimony and with the rose-coloured tufts of willow herb. The ditches of the water meadows were overgrown with meadowsweet; and under the crowded stems of the hazel copses the yellowing leaf spears of the dead bluebells were covered with masses of enchanter’s nightshade.

But the real quality of these cloudless August days was to be found in the cornfields. Here amid the tall yellow stalks and the grain-swollen ears of wheat and barley rose up as if over night, millions and millions of poppy flowers. Something about the texture of these filmy scarlet petals, as if they had been made of the blood of the earth itself, shed by hot sun kisses and staunched by hot sun breath, carried the very secret of that season from field to field and across the white haze-tremulous roads.

Little quivering vibrations in the air, waves of heat, would be seen floating now over the tops of thyme-scented banks or over the burnished metallic surface of the bracken. And as these flickering heat waves drew their faint purplish veil between one’s eyes and the landscape, they brought with them the feeling, even in the midst of some brief stroll abroad after early tea, that one was upon a long, significant journey; a journey to a country quite unknown, to great dim cities with towers and spires, far off, over leagues and leagues of shimmering poppy-stained vapour!

And indeed, as one great spacious golden morning followed another, there did seem to grow upon the consciousness of more than one of the persons living in Ashover the feeling that they were being carried forward on some steady-keeled purple-sailed galleon toward the unknown marvels of an unknown harbour.

Lady Ann, now beginning the eighth month of her pregnancy, seldom left the garden. For hours she would sit on her chair under the linden tree, her hands idly clasped upon the book in her lap, her eyes fixed on the shadows on the grass.

Rook had become more considerate and more tender toward her as her time drew near; but he could not pretend to an excitement he did not feel; and for any sympathy in the paramount question that absorbed her — would her child prove to be a boy? — she was driven to the rather teasing and exhausting speculations of Mrs. Ashover, combined with the old lady’s memories of the pre-natal peculiarities of her own sons.

It was the beginning of the second week in the month. The herbaceous borders of the Ashover garden had become like little tropical forests of heavily scented blooms to the bumble-bees and humming-bird moths that moved about among them. Round the high stalks of the delphiniums and the hollyhocks all manner of smaller flowers huddled themselves: petunias, verbenas, calceolarias mingling with every variety of campanula.

“How incredibly secure,” thought Rook to himself, as at about two o’clock in the afternoon of a day that seemed even hotter than the preceding ones he strolled along the flower borders with the vague intention of taking the opportunity of a solitary walk while his mother and his wife both rested and the whole place was hushed in its noon siesta, “how incredibly secure and complacent you do look!” He surveyed half-enviously a small patch of blue lobelia that had got itself wedged in between two tufts of London Pride. “I suppose the life of a lobelia is entirely composed of long delicious passive sensations! I suppose a deep narcissistic ecstasy in its own Tyrian blueness is thrilling through it at this moment, combined with all sorts of mysterious rapports with the earth and air such as our animal senses have absolutely no idea of! I daresay it can even feel the movement of the planet itself; very likely blowing back a lovely freshness upon it, through all this heat, from airs outside any of the airs that we’re conscious of! And it probably has the most subtle nuances of pleasure from its sense of the deep cool earth under its roots. I must tell Twiney to make sure he waters all these beds every evening now!”

He glanced at his wife’s chair with her book and parasol left upon it; and it struck his mind how completely this girl of sport and adventure had submitted to her new rôle. He sighed heavily as he turned the corner of the house; for it was borne in upon him that he had made not the least attempt to penetrate the barrier of aristocratic reserve with which this mother of his child had guarded her feelings. She must have been having her panics and her disgusts; as well as her thrilling moments of mysterious pleasure! He certainly had made no attempt to arrive at any real intimacy with her, at any intelligent comprehension of what she was feeling at this crisis in her life.

What strange creatures human beings were! What obstinate, obdurate walls of egoism separated them from one another and substituted ignorant hostility for imaginative understanding! He walked round the house and down the kitchen-garden path where the rows of dahlias, tied to tall sticks, were still only masses of dark glossy foliage with chilly sour-looking globular buds that in their immaturity seemed to reject rather than welcome the noon heat. The difference between these sap-cold shining-leafed plants and the warm bloom of the peaches ripening so fast against the hot red bricks of the great garden wall fell in with his fatalistic thoughts; seemed to suggest the same insurmountable divergencies in the vegetable world as existed in human nerves!

But how infinitely shut away from vexations and tribulations the garden was, with its floating breaths from mint and rosemary, with its vague, sweet, diffused essence of ripening fruit under the hot, tarry netting, where the wasps buzzed and the white butterflies played!

The place seemed to hold up invisible barriers against everything in the world that was not gracious and time-mellowed. Mild ghosts of generations of placid gardeners seemed to bend over those well-weeded furrows of brown earth mould; seemed to raise old wrinkled sunburnt hands to the rusty nail heads and mouldering shreds of cloth which held the smooth twigs of the apricots; seemed to shuffle along those quiet paths carrying musk-scented geranium plants from “frame” to flower bed!