John Powys - Ducdame

Every complicated and suppressed irritation he had ever harboured against Lexie rose to the surface. He felt as if he had wilfully allowed his remorse about Netta to tie his hands in a struggle with his brother which had been secretly going on for many months; a struggle as to whether he with his translunar lust, or Lexie, with his humorous satyrishness, should carry off this sensitive little being of the twisted mouth and the slender pliable limbs!

No sooner was he round the first corner and out of sight of Mr. Twiney than he stood stock still, staring at the woods in front of him. He knew well where Titty’s Ring was. It was a clearing in the centre of the wood where the ground became level for a short distance and where in former times there had been a spring. Lexie had had from childhood a curious predilection for this particular spot; for the lusciousness of the long damp grass that grew there, for its complete isolation in the centre of so much undergrowth, for its cuckoo-flowers that were larger and of a deeper lilac there than down in the valley, while all the years he had known it there had been two grass snakes in that place, which every spring cast their spotted skins; of which skins he had collected quite a number, mysterious and unique objects, different in the feeling of their scaly texture from anything else in the whole world!

It was, in fact, as Rook well knew, a symbolic and significant fact that his brother had taken Nell to this favourite spot of his, and had taken her there, too, on an afternoon that seemed, as Lexie himself would have put it, “dedicated” to such a felicitous proceeding.

He approached the fence that separated him from the wood and began staring savagely into its umbrageous recesses. The wood itself became, as he gazed into its leafy shadows, an utterly different thing from what it had been before. It became a classic and Arcadian refuge, “dear to Pan and the Nymphs,” in whose embowered hiding-places all the responsibilities of the world fell away and vanished.

Rook began to visualize the scene in Titty’s Ring with an intensity that caused him a sick sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He made a faint troubled effort to remember the menace that overhung his brother’s life; but even as he did this he found his own fingers fumbling at the little box containing those morphia tablets, the loss of which, when he returned the other one, Lexie had never discovered. No! He himself, as his mind became more and more morbid, might be driven to die, too. And that being so, the difference between their two fates was not so tremendous as to give him a cruel and outrageous advantage.

And after all, at the bottom of things, when it became a matter of two males fighting for a female, these questions of honour and justice and fairness and even decency, didn’t they always go to the wall? Lexie had flung them over. There had been a sort of tacit understanding between them about Nell; and though he had certainly allowed Lexie to think that he had withdrawn from the field, it was taking his withdrawal a little too literally, to act as if Nell were entirely fancy-free.

Rook’s thoughts, as the August sun beat upon his head, growing even hotter as it sank a little from the zenith, were so wild and unbalanced as to resemble the thoughts of a person in a fever. The shock of what he had just heard and the vivid material images his mind kept conjuring up of what was going on at Titty’s Ring stirred up a certain black mud of human maliciousness which lay dormant in one deep recess of his nature.

The most fantastic ideas entered his mind; the idea, for example, that he was the victim of a conspiracy of persecution, or at least of manipulation, in which everyone in his circle played a definite part, propitiating and managing him to ends that were theirs and not his.

He began to envisage Netta’s disappearance as part of this conspiracy and it presented itself to him that his wife had probably encouraged Lexie in this more serious pursuit of Nell. And his mother, too! He recalled now how often in the last few weeks the old lady had held him at her side, no doubt to keep him away from Toll-Pike Cottage. He felt an angry sensation of being waylaid and humoured and manœuvred at every turn, of being surrounded by the pressure of soft, firm, strong hands that were regulating his life contrary to his deepest life illusion!

Once more he began to feel that in opposition to the free play of his identity all these terrible forces of tribal continuity and tribal self-assertion were using him for purposes utterly foreign to his own personal vision of existence. They intended that the family should have an inheritor; and in order that this should come to pass they were prepared to turn him, Rook Ashover, into a mere passive link in a chain that stretched back to the 13th Century and forward God knows how far!

The old blind vicious feeling came over him that he, a lonely, solitary, hunted figure, was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with “Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers,” all conspiring to reduce his independent life to a meaningless cipher!

Well! He would fight them all; and if Lexie — the only human soul in the world that he really loved — went over to their side, he would fight him, too, whether he were a dying man or not! All the time that these extravagant thoughts whirled through his brain he held his cloth cap in his hand; and the early afternoon sun, full of the iron virulence which it possesses at that hour, intensified the fever that raged within him.

All at once, driven by a sudden irresistible impulse, he forced his way through the fence and plunged into the wood. Like Lexie he knew every stick and stone of that countryside; and it was not long before he hit upon one of the little mossy paths, formerly game drives but invaded now by every sort of vegetation, which intersected the thick undergrowth.

He followed this path with a stride that grew more and more rapid as he advanced; for he knew by the look of certain outstanding trees that he was not far from the piece of level ground where Titty’s Ring and other smaller nameless expanses of open grass broke the leafy monotony.

Arrived at the first of these woodland greenswards he paused for a minute to take breath. Steady, unflickering shadows, dark as the hollow places in some immense sorrowful upturned face, lay in great silent pools on the deep-rooted grass. Faint vibrations of the air that could hardly be called winds lifted the feathery seed tops of hawkweed and dandelion; while out of the silence all around him came indescribable sighings and rustlings, as if an invisible population of elemental beings, lighter than air itself, were awakening from their noon siesta.

Wiping the sweat from his forehead with the cap he was still clutching in his fingers, he shook his head solemnly and gravely from side to side as if replying to some formidable argument of an unseen antagonist. He then moved away from this first clearing and took a path opposite to the path by which he had come.

A second greensward was followed by yet another, each one more magical in its shadowy seclusion; and Rook felt as if he were passing through a series of sacred groves, the leafy purlieus and outermost “lady-chapels,” it might be, of some thrice-holy place, as yet unvisited by any human votary!

Hush! He was certain that he had heard voices….

He stopped dead still, listening intently, cursing the loud chatter of a jay that broke the surrounding stillness.

It was those two! He knew their tones. He knew the amorousness in his brother’s low chuckling laugh; he knew the faint broken protest — who would not know that if not he? — of Nell’s timid and enchanting reluctance.

The path in which he waited now was narrowed and almost closed by several horn-beam bushes; and to the end of his life he remembered the look of those thick leaves, so olive-green on one side and so ivory-white on the other! One of these bushes had extended clear across the path; and unwilling to force his way noisily through its thick growth he sank down upon hands and knees and crept under it, still holding his cloth cap in one hand and his stick in the other.