John Powys: Ducdame

There was an awkward pause between the three of them, during which Netta loosened the wet mackintosh from her throat and moved away from the support of a table lest her dampness should spoil Lexie’s papers.

The drenched condition of the two women seemed to draw into that little room a desolate melancholy essence composed of fallen leaves, muddy cart ruts, and clammy mist. Toward the water that still clung to their bodies the great moving volume of water outside seemed stretching itself through the little window in irresistible attraction.

The red coals in Lexie’s grate seemed to lose something of their power. The rosy glow reflected from Lexie’s crowded bookcases seemed to fade. The little blue fire devil that danced like a demon butterfly on the top of the coals flagged and drooped. A great blind streaming face was pressed against the window — the gray featureless face of the rain. It was as if a corpse-cold cloudy arm, wavering and shadowy, fumbled and plucked at those two dripping figures; as though, drenched as they were, they belonged to the drowning fields outside and not to this warm human interior. Lexie himself, as he looked from the one to the other, felt conscious that something from those miles of soaked pastures, something beyond the mere drenched clothes and rain-draggled hair of the two girls, was separating them from him by an impassable barrier.

The thing made him petulant, querulous. It was always like this with women, he thought. They were so damnably absorbent of the chemistry of nature! They were so easily submerged by these elemental forces! When one wanted them to be especially rational and attentive, their bodies were drifting off, tissue by tissue, cell by cell, upon some long inhuman tide, leading God knows where!

He got up now with a painful effort, an effort that made Netta instinctively spring forward, while Cousin Ann fell back against the wall as if to ward off a blow.

“Do you know why she comes to me like this?” he said, leaning forward and addressing Netta.

Netta hurriedly withdrew the hand she had stretched out to support him.

“Don’t!” she murmured, shaking her head. “Don’t!” And then with a voice that gathered a sudden unexpected power: “Please sit down again, Mr. Lexie, and let me leave her here. Rook will understand.”

The rugged-faced thin man leaned still farther forward. His hands pressed hard against the little table, shook it so that the broom-rape trembled.

“Rook!” he cried. “I should think he will understand! She comes to me to square me! Do you hear, you dear little fool? To square me! Did you think she came for anything else?”

His voice died away in his mouth like an echo in an open doorway; but his mouth still hung open, the under lip pendulous and quivering; and a drop of saliva ran down to the tip of his chin.

“Go! Both of you!” he cried hoarsely; and sinking back into his chair he turned obstinately toward the fire, hugging his thin knees.

Netta was conscious of nothing else but a desire to bend over that figure and press that heavy curly head against her breast; but Cousin Ann with a fierce little red spot burning on each of her cheeks had become completely mistress of the situation.

“Good-bye, Lexie,” she said quietly. “Come, Netta.”

They moved toward the door, but as they went out he turned again.

“Why don’t you go to Hastings and square him? He’ll give you reasons. But you’d better not read his book. Do you hear? Don’t you dare to read his book! You have reasons enough without that. Ask Nell. She can tell you.” His haggard profile and deep-set sombre-lidded eye seemed thrusting a pike into Cousin Ann’s retreating figure.

“ It’s all in the book! ” he shouted after them as they closed the door and ran down the stairs.

MRS. ASHOVER walked with a firm quick step. No one would have guessed, to see her little thin black figure making its way through the long grass of the orchard, that this was the seventy-third November the power of which she had defied.

The gate leading from the orchard to the sloping hill called Battlefield was a gate heavy on its latch. But it was a gate that Mrs. Ashover had manipulated as a young bride fifty years before and she was not to be daunted by it now. She rubbed her forefinger thoughtfully up and down its gray lichen-grown top bar. The sun was warm around her, a slanting autumn sun, and it fell pleasantly on the ancient gate and on the rough yellow patches of lichen which filled the crevices of that half-century-old plank. A piece of woodwork exposed to all the elements is a very different thing from a piece of woodwork protected within a barn or a church. Its life is five times as intense; its experiences five times as acute. That top bar by the time this particular afternoon sun reached it must have been, if vividness of experience were allowed to count, older than Dürer’s famous Madonna in Nuremberg.

Mrs. Ashover looked from the gate to an old apple tree that grew beside it and from the tree she looked to the ground. A sprinkling of yellow apples had been left there, and many of them were half buried in the rank thick-bladed grass.

Mrs. Ashover tapped the gate with her knuckles. It was annoying that Rook was so careless and so casual in his handling of the place. In John’s day good cooking apples such as these would have been gathered to the last rain-soaked pippin.

With a shrug of her shoulders and a fierce little sigh the old lady forced the stubborn latch and pushed the gate open.

When it was shut behind her she resolutely ascended the hill. She stepped carefully over the mole runs, avoided the patches of brown bracken and the mysterious hollow places that broke the ascent, and finally, a little out of breath, arrived at the summit of Heron’s Ridge.

The horizontal sun threw her slim erect shadow along the close-cropped turf as emphatically as it threw the shadows of the Scotch firs. They were twice as old as she was, these trees; but she felt just then as if she were their contemporary. She prodded the trunk of one of them with her ebony stick. The gesture relieved her feelings; and she continued it till a piece of red-brown bark fell upon the ground.

With a flickering smile on her thin lips she left the tree and, moving to the farther crest of the ridge, looked down into the less familiar valley. A grassy slope, patched with bracken and furze, locally named Dorsal, led down to a narrow muddy lane. Beyond this lane a thick undergrowth of small oaks and hazels mounted up to a high leafy skyline called Antiger Great Knoll. There was only one human habitation visible between Dorsal and the Antiger Woods and upon this habitation she now fixed her eyes.

It was a small gamekeeper’s cottage surrounded by pheasant coops and fowl runs. A footpath led down to it from where she stood; and an untidy vegetable garden, in which a bonfire of weeds was then burning, separated it from the lane.

Mrs. Ashover contemplated this scene for some moments in an attitude of intense thought. She knew every tuft of furze, every bracken patch, every grassy excrescence, every gravelly hollow, as well as she knew the furniture in her own bedroom.

There was the dead ash tree struck by lightning forty years before, at the roots of which she used to sit and sketch and read, before Lexie was born.

There was the rabbit burrow, with the earth mould freshly disturbed and the little pellets of excrement freshly dropped, just as it had looked, with the sun falling aslant upon it, when she used to bring out her writing case and write long letters about her children and her husband to dear Edith, Cousin Ann’s mother.

She could actually recall a certain sentence she had used, on one of these occasions, which poor dear Edith had commented upon and been greatly shocked by.