John Powys - Ducdame

So he argued with himself, applying the balm of convoluted reasoning to the wound he had received; a wound that all the while was healing from another cause … from the relief of a blow that had only been delivered on the astral plane! Restrained from following the girl by all these concerted withholdings, Rook himself sank down now on the grass of Titty’s Ring by the side of his brother and accepted from his fingers a cigarette of peace.

“Think of all the hands through which this little white tube has passed,” said Lexie, with a relaxed sententiousness, “only that it may burn itself out into thin air, between two quarrelling men, in the heart of a Dorset wood!”

He pulled out his little box as he spoke and swallowed a couple of the lozenge-shaped tablets. Rook was conscious of a faint sardonic malice as he let his own finger and thumb toy with the companion box in his waistcoat pocket.

They subsided into gloomy silence while the wood murmurs around them became a sighing echo of the great forward-rushing flood of Time, swallowing everything up.

“By the way, Lexie,” Rook said after a pause, “doesn’t it seem as if it were carrying things a trifle far, for us both to be making love so openly to the wife of the village priest? Hastings, of course, is too lost in his book to care what his girl does; but I did get a hint from Twiney just now that the village had begun to talk.”

Lexie looked at him with narrowed, screwed-up eyelids. Rook got a faint impression of something approaching a lewd wink; but Lexie’s eyes had so many natural wrinkles around them that he may have been deceived.

“I notice,” said the younger Ashover, “that it isn’t until your particular star is suffering a momentary eclipse that this matter of propriety comes to the front. Good Lord! if we’re to begin considering the feelings of the village we might as well give up having any pleasure at all. At least I might, who haven’t been blessed with a mistress like Netta or a wife like Ann! Why! Do you realize that I haven’t had any dalliance with any wench at all since those days when we used to go to Tollminster together?” His voice became high-pitched and even querulous. “I tell you it would be monstrous if I should go down to my grave without having known any pleasure!”

He fell into a fit of bottomless gloom from which his voice emerged again like the sound of a bumble-bee in a great foxglove bell.

“I adore them all!” he muttered. “I adore them all!”

Rook watched him with sympathy; but a mysterious meanness in himself at which he was both surprised and ashamed made the difference of their luck in this particular case not altogether disagreeable to his inmost mind. A very queer sort of vicious irritable malice, akin to the malice with which one regards the struggles of a mob at the ticket office of a theatre, took possession of him as he looked at Lexie’s agitated face. He felt for one second as if it would give him a wicked delight to crowd Titty’s Ring with the forms of sleeping mænads; and then, immediately afterward, to obliterate them with a wave of his hand!

His thoughts were interrupted by an unexpected remark from his brother.

“Nell is quite certain now,” said Lexie gravely, “that Hastings does know where Netta is. She got it out of him last night that he knows. She told me to tell you.”

The whole face of the surrounding scene changed in a moment for Rook Ashover. He rose and pulled his brother up by his hands.

“Damn the man!” he cried fiercely. “I thought there was something of that kind. Come on; let me get you down to the cart. Twiney’s been waiting long enough.” He took Lexie by the arm and held the hornbeam branches back while he passed through.

The sound of their footsteps, the rustling of leaves and cracking of twigs died away in the distance. The light wind lifted the grasses of Titty’s Ring with an undulating airy softness that was neither melancholy nor cheerful, a remote softness that did not correspond with any emotions known to the human race.

Clouds of wavering gnats rose and fell, veered and drifted, across that sunlit space; and in their movements there was a sort of rhythm as if they were obeying some unseen fairy orchestration.

The two spotted green snakes, secure now of any interruption, came forth side by side. They might have been drawing the beechnut chariot of Titania herself; so carefully did they advance, every now and then lifting their purple-stained heads and darting out their tiny forked tongues. No other living thing appeared. Sunlight and shadow lay peacefully side by side; and silence fell upon silence like water upon water.

But nothing that stirs the magnetic currents between human beings, those waves of emotion that are like invisible harp strings and are so cruelly jarred, can be altogether lost in the atmosphere where it was begotten.

Something remains, some faint disturbance, some ghostly ripple, in that particular air, of which minds that are sensitive to such vibrations must for ever afterward be conscious.

Limned in that enclosure between woodland and woodland, some shadowy residue, some tenuous adumbration of those three human forms would thenceforth tremble there on the verge of visibility.

Long afterward when those three persons were dead and buried, the eidolons of what had happened to them in that agitated moment would be ready to resume their shape.

The rains might disfigure that spot and the storms dismantle it. Titania’s snakes might reach their appointed sum of years and cast no more skins. It still would remain as an evidence of the potency of human passion that something in the quality of that place would never again be quite as it was before. Less palpable than any revenant of definite shape, these airy essences would only touch the nerves of such as were responsive enough to feel them. But as long as Titania’s Ring did not lose altogether the character it held then there would be that upon its air that would not pass with the passing of any summer.

ALL through the rest of that hot August, night alter night in the small book-littered room at Toll-Pike Cottage, Rook wrestled with William Hastings over the matter of Netta’s address. The priest did not deny, on the contrary he quite openly admitted, that he knew where she was; but weeks passed and nothing that Rook could say or do was able to shake his obstinate resolution.

“I promised Miss Page not to betray her and I won’t betray her.”

They gradually became occasions of a curious and complicated perversity, these recurrent and prolonged conversations in that stuffy little room. Nell did not by any means always absent herself from the arguments between the two men; and her presence, when she joined them, added its own troubled implication to the increasing morbidity of these strange encounters.

In her reaction against both Rook and Lexie after that incident in Titty’s Ring she had drawn insensibly closer to her husband. What had gone on in the depths of that entangled system of nervous susceptibilities which her slight frame enclosed would have required the elucidation of a book far nearer to the mysteries of life than that sinister manuscript in her husband’s bureau now so seldom looked upon!

Her romantic devotion to Rook, already removed from the turmoil of her disturbed senses, sublimated itself during these hot August weeks into a passionate longing to do something, to do anything, to restore his peace of mind. She had begun to believe that if only she could bring Netta into his life again, that restless fever that seemed eating out his soul would be allayed and quieted.

Her unsatisfied craving for love, roused and irritated by days and days of feebler and feebler resistance to Lexie’s ardour, turned now, in her reaction from her yielding mood of that one unfortunate afternoon, into a less fastidious and more complying attitude toward her legal companion.