John Powys - Ducdame

She glanced over her shoulder at Hastings’s face. Was it some movement, some muttering of his, that had roused her into this unnatural wakefulness? She looked at his watch on the little table beside them. It pointed to half-past two; just that particular hour of the night which Rook always maintained was associated with the lowest ebb of vitality in mortal pulses; the hour when ships sank, when wild geese failed in their flight, when old trees and old men turned cold, and when animals and children were stillborn.

Ah! It must have been Hastings who had disturbed her; for he was beginning to talk in his sleep now.

His words were broken and incoherent; fragments, it might well have seemed, and wind-tossed straws, of that troubled substance, the whole compact rondure of which seemed to be bearing them gustily through space, buffeted up — down — here — there — by winds that had no mercy and no purpose.

All at once she bent down above him and listened with every sense in her body; listened with the beatings of her heart above all; and with a cold tension of her muscles.

“I’ll see you dead before I’ll tell you!”

Her brain became one petrified conch of listening. It became a brittle shell through which some mysterious sound was destined to pass which it found almost unbearable.

But she had to bear it; and it did not fail to come in that commonplace, realistic, matter-of-fact manner characteristic of all true oracles.

“Thirteen Walpole Street” came the words from the sleeping man. “Walpole Street.” And then there followed more incoherent mutterings and once again that ferocious sentence the words of which seemed to glow with a smouldering lava-like fury. “I’ll see you dead before I’ll tell you!”

He rambled on a little further after that; but his words carried no more significance to her ear than does the wash of the tide upon the pier-posts of a ferry when the traveller has once stepped ashore. She sank down again by his side in that wind-tossed half-moonlight and lay staring at the little squares of the window.

As so often happens with momentous human decisions, such as carry in their train drastic issues and devastating results, the first knowledge she had herself of the thing she was going to do seemed in some curious way to precede and antedate all the motives that subsequently accounted for it.

It was as if she were making a discovery in the mind of another person, the definite discovery, in fact, that this other person had decided, for reasons absolutely hidden from everyone, to bring Netta Page back to Ashover!

What she really discovered, as she stared at those window squares, was that she herself had irrevocably decided to bring Netta back; but this decision — based upon nothing that could be accounted for by any rational argument — required every kind of rational argument to support it and make it plausible!

What she felt within herself as she considered her plan — this plan that she suddenly discovered to be already existing — was that, now she knew Netta’s address, it would be impossible to hide it from Rook; and if Rook knew it he would take the next train for London. It seemed so much better for Netta to be the one to make the journey. If Rook went off in his present mood, God knows when he would come back. And obviously he would go. She knew him well enough to know that for an absolute certainty. Well, then, if she didn’t want to think of him breaking away from everyone and staying on blindly with Netta in London, the only thing to do was to bring Netta to him.

She had begun to feel an unmitigated reaction against the morbid entanglement into which the existence of that secret had brought the three of them. She hated to think of her husband in that particular light. She hated to think of his having that advantage over Rook. To bring Netta herself upon the scene was to clear the air in every direction. She did feel a moment’s qualm at the thought of doing it when Ann’s child was so near birth. But Ann had never been considerate of her feelings or indeed of any one’s. Ann had always struck out remorselessly for her own hand! So drastically had she done so that it seemed a kind of Quixotism to consider Ann in the matter at all. The person to be considered was Rook and as far as Rook was concerned, now that she knew where Netta was, there seemed to be only two conceivable alternatives: either to give him the address without comment, which would mean his going off pell-mell to London, to return God knew when; or to wire Netta straight away and send her the money to make the journey herself!

As to what would happen later on, as to what permanent arrangements Rook might wish to make, or Netta might be prepared to make, that must be left to the future to decide. She and William would have done their part, as soon as Netta and Rook had been brought together again! Her own desire was simply to reinstate her husband’s dignity in Rook’s eyes, and Rook’s dignity in her husband’s eyes; and to break up the unhealthy and sinister duel between them which had converted that August into one of the most morbid epochs in her life.

Of any deliberate revenge upon Lady Ann her mind was quite unconscious. She just ruled Lady Ann out of court as a person who could be trusted to strike out for herself, whatever happened. She had not forgotten the intrusion into her dining room, or the exposure of the plate with the three pansies beside it. That incident had made a dent upon her mind which the intervening months had not obliterated, but it played no part in what she felt now. The waves of thought that kept overleaping one another in her small oval-shaped head as she stared at the square panes, at the racing yellow-tinged clouds, at the formless moon, were almost all generous and romantic.

The most dominant and most recurrent of these thoughts if they had been translated into definite words would have run as follows: “Rook is pining for Netta, who will never understand him as I understand him. But he wants her; he is full of remorse about her. Left to Ann and Ann’s child, he will eat his heart out in utter misery. I alone can save him by bringing Netta into his life again.”

The day that dawned upon this eventful night was a dark and strange one even for that unusual September. It suggested rain; but it was not raining. It suggested thunder; but there was no thunder. Only, without the assistance of any frost or of any apparent wind, the first fluttering down of leaves took place in all manner of unexpected directions.

Even Hastings felt the influence of the day. “Don’t you smell something queer in the air this morning, Nell?” he said to her at breakfast.

The girl nodded in silence, waiting for the right moment to make her momentous announcement.

“It’s extraordinarily odd,” he went on, “but I keep being conscious of some subtle smell — in this room — in the garden — in the road — that I haven’t noticed since I was a child. It’s not exactly a smell, either! It’s more than that. It’s a taste in the mouth and a strange indescribable feeling through every pore of the body.”

Nell did begin to listen to him now, lifting up her chin between a vase of salpiglossis and a vase of cinerarias, both of them brought from the Ashover garden by Rook.

“I keep thinking of all sorts of little objects connected with my life when I was a child,” Hastings continued. “I see the backs of certain volumes of the Latin classics my father used to read. My father was a cobbler, Nell. Have I ever told you that? But he had a mania for reading Latin. He was not a learned man. It was a sort of fantastic game with him. And there’s something about the smell of this air that makes me think of London pavements and the peculiar feeling of the wet city mist on your face when you open a window into a room lit by gas and crowded with leather-bound books.”