John Powys - Ducdame

Hastings himself began to be vaguely aware of unsuspected depths of perversity in his own feelings, especially in regard to his contest with Rook. He found himself deriving a vicious triumph from drawing out to further and further lengths the protracted struggle between them and he was even tempted sometimes to pretend to be weakening in his resistance in order that his opponent should not lose hope and retire in anger and disgust.

But if there were unsounded levels of morbidity in his desire that their strange duel should not end too quickly, there were still more furtive depths in his attitude to Rook and Nell when he had them together under his eye. He did not hesitate at these times to make the very utmost of the newly established relations between himself and his young wife, playing unscrupulously upon Nell’s desperate desire that he should reveal his treasured secret and exploiting her touching attempts to persuade him.

Nell had not the remotest inkling of all that was going on in his mind. She herself, with a young girl’s erotic egoism, was living just then in a sort of lingered-out trance of dreamy self-effacement. Had she known what ambiguous motives were mingling with his refusal to yield up Netta’s secret she would have shrunk from his caresses as from those of a hooded snake. But her indignant disgust, as in so many similar cases, would not have been altogether just or fair. Hastings had, until that eventful summer, lived so completely in his metaphysical thoughts that he might be said to have had no normal human life at all; and now when, for the first time under the biting whip of jealousy, his natural self-assertion rose up and demanded satisfaction, it was only to find that this long-starved, long-delayed burgeoning was afflicted at the very root.

Against the corrosive poison of the humiliation he endured from the mere sight of Rook and Nell together his wounded vanity turned and turned upon itself, like an animal that turns against its own flesh; and by a strange obscure law, working in that dark inner world, he found his account in lacerating his own deep hurt still further; because, in so doing, he dragged the others down with him in a morbid complicity of shame.

As August drew to a close and the ninth month of Lady Ann’s pregnancy approached, Rook felt himself becoming more and more of a lean, lifeless, motiveless shadow of the man he had formerly been. The preparations for his son’s birth — for no one seemed for a moment to doubt the sex of the newcomer — caused him nothing but irritation. It was as though, as the infant came nearer and nearer to birth, it drew to itself every magnetic current of vitality that stirred in the air about it. The atmosphere of Ashover House seemed to exist for no other purpose than for nourishing this insatiable intruder; and Rook went to and fro among his people with a sense of seeing his most cherished fancies and illusions reduced to insignificant wind-wafted straws blown up and down the steps of the Capitolium in the path of a young Cæsar!

There were moments when that strange hallucination of the rider on the gray horse who had overtaken him on the road to Comber’s End returned with a dim rebuking gesture at the excess of his pusillanimity; but for the most part he found himself shrinking away from the flushed triumphant languor of Lady Ann, from the nervous excitement of Mrs. Ashover, from the gloating whispers and glances of Pandie and Mrs. Vabbin.

It was indeed with the feeling of an escape from something that had grown well-nigh unbearable that he kept returning, every few days, to his attacks upon the secretive malignity of Mr. Hastings. To his conscious mind it was always of Netta that he thought; but in reality the mere neighbourhood of Nell’s devotion, the mere propinquity of that supple youthful body and those clinging idealizing glances, was something that restored him to his lost place in the centre of his universe, something that transformed him back, from a negligible courtier mannikin in the train of his offspring, to an authentic protagonist in his own life tragedy, dealing with existence on equal terms!

The last day of August came and went; and with its departure the weather showed signs of changing. Gusty westerly winds, blowing up from the Bristol Channel across Sedgemoor and Blackmore, began troubling the sun-bleached trees and moaning disconsolately through the deserted stubble fields.

Rook had begun to grow conscious that he was playing no very dignified part in this psychological chess game. He felt certain uneasy misgivings as to whether his determination to drag the secret at all costs out of the husband had resulted in anything more palpable than the distraction of his own troubled nerves by the society of the wife.

There came over him, too, as he began to recognize that Hastings had an obstinacy in him that no importunity and no persuasion could influence, an ugly and unpleasant sense of having been entangled in some equivocal spiritual orgy that was exercising a drug-like and sinister effect upon all three of them.

He felt ashamed that he had permitted this Toll-Pike obsession, whatever its nature might be, to interfere with the frequency of his visits to Lexie. Lexie had not been so well after that Titty’s Ring excursion; and though whenever he and his brother did meet it was quite on the old unassailable footing, the younger Ashover could not help being conscious that the only permanent effect of the summer jaunts which he had found so sweet was to throw his timid companion back more unhesitatingly into the arms of her husband, more absorbingly into her platonic passion for Rook.

If Lexie could have pierced with his sagacious weather eye the mile or so of gusty autumn-smelling air and the few inches of brick and mortar which separated his candle-lit chamber from these nocturnal encounters at Toll-Pike Cottage, he would have made more than his usual grimace of disgust at the neurotic tricks of the human mind. It would have seemed to him that the very atmosphere of that room of Hastings’s was penetrated with unnatural suppressions. He would have denounced every one of its three occupants as being engaged in spinning out, like so many demented silkworms, a thick unhealthy cocoon of meretricious emotion. He would have cast upon his brother one of those looks of indignant moral contempt such as a shrewd horse-dealer turns upon a showy but short-winded nag. And if he could have appeared before the three of them with an appropriate protest upon his tongue, it would have referred to the superiority of the most gross and the most unsophisticated bawdiness over this super-subtle mental dissipation!

As one rain-swept day followed another over the roofs of that Frome-side village the sense of expectancy, in the minds of all the persons with whom we are concerned, grew steadily heavier and heavier; until it became something that could hardly be borne.

This expectant mood, with the burden of gathering fate pressing upon it, is a natural enough phenomenon in all cases of child-birth. In this case, however, it went further. It affected Marsh Alley and Toll-Pike as well as Ashover House. It entered the innocent domicile of Mr. Pod. It sat down like a veiled figure upon the lintel of Mr. Twiney. It even seemed to visit the stable of the long-necked mare; so ominous and plaintive were the whinnyings that proceeded from that square window abutting on the village street.

More than ten days of these September gusts had passed; when, one stormy night, Nell Hastings found herself suddenly and unaccountably wide awake in her bed. There was a waning half-moon observable through her window which kept throwing a pallid stream of light across her husband’s sleeping head, before it was swallowed up once more by swift-travelling clouds.

The girl felt impelled to prop herself up on her elbows and stare out upon that patch of troubled changing sky. She had that uncomfortable sense of vast world-wide impending catastrophe which often comes to people, when, at some moment usually associated with oblivion, they catch the face of the world off-guard, so to speak, and in unsuspecting disarray.