John Powys - Ducdame

He sank into silence again; but his face bore such a happy, dreamy expression that Nell was quite shocked by his next words when, after a long pause, he looked across at her with a light in his eyes.

“I shall take my book up again this morning,” he said. “I’ve been getting a new angle on it during these nights with Ashover. I’ve been tapping his brain without his knowing it — not for ideas exactly — but to get my own thoughts into focus.”

He rose from the table as he spoke and going to the window opened it a little farther.

“There’s the smell of something more than rain out there,” he said. “If you want to know what I really think, Nell, I think there’s a terrific thunderstorm coming up! Perhaps it’s that which brings what I have to write next in my book — my chapter of all chapters, Nell! — with such a mad rush into my mind.”

He moved back to his chair, but instead of reseating himself, he leant against it, keeping his eyes fixed upon her and growing more and more excited.

“I believe I could finish the whole thing if I really got started to-day, Nell. I’ve only four more chapters. But they’re the difficult ones. That’s why I’ve been letting it go lately. They’re the ones that explain the actual process of cosmic unravelling. They’re the ones that give the clue to the unwinding of the clock!”

She looked at his illuminated and disturbed face with a scrutinizing eye. Had he the natural human intelligence to grasp all she meant to do by having Netta here? One could never tell with him! There was an obstinate wilfulness in the man that might sheer off at any tangent, at any moment. “Shall I speak to him now?” she thought. “Or shall I wait?”

Her decision, like so many human decisions, was brought to a head by something entirely outside her control. She caught sight of the village postman passing their gate, an occurrence that meant that in the space of about half an hour, giving him time to reach Ashover House and return, he would be passing it again and consequently be at hand to enable her to carry out her precipitate plan.

She moved straight up to her husband, and in a low, hurried, eager voice confessed what she had overheard and what she wished to do.

The criss-cross currents that tossed themselves into spray within the depths of the priest’s mind took two main directions as he listened to her breathless suggestion.

The first of these tidal currents was full of a heavy sulkiness at being betrayed into giving up his secret; a secret which had become a sort of fetish with him as being the symbol of his malignant advantage over Rook Ashover. It was just because those harmless syllables, “Thirteen Walpole Street,” had become a kind of mania with the man that he had been overheard muttering them in his sleep; and now Nell was in possession of them!

But the second of these two mental tides contradicted the mood of the first. By having Nell and Rook so often recently under his eye his jealousy had gathered momentum; while the perverse forms of malignity which at the start had supplied an antidote to this jealousy were beginning to lose their savour and to grow tiresome and insipid.

There were several reasons why Nell’s surprising suggestion did not altogether displease him. For one thing he felt sure it would mean the end of this platonic philandering between his wife and Ashover. Rook could hardly make use of Toll-Pike Cottage as a rendezvous for two love affairs! In the second place, it would cause definite and emphatic annoyance to Lady Ann; for whom, ever since he had learnt that she was to be a mother, he had nourished one of his queer half-neurotic, half-metaphysical aversions.

As Nell talked to him now she could see from his expression that his feelings were not by any means simple. She had recourse therefore to a grand feminine coup , which came to her by a sort of inspiration.

“You know what you have so often felt,” she pleaded, “with regard to all our friends here? Well— that , at any rate, will be quite different when you’ve asserted yourself between Netta and Rook.”

He stared at her in clouded bewilderment. What on earth did she mean? He could not believe that she saw quite as clearly as her hint implied the gaping depths of the hurt to his self-love which his position as the priest of the village had worked in him.

“You mean?” he murmured tentatively.

She looked straight at him now; and, like so many essentially honest and unscheming women, she found that the very integrity of her nature gave her a power, when she was embarked on a campaign of diplomacy, far more effective than any actual cunning in argument.

“I mean that it’ll be more of a relief to me than I can tell you for you to be worthy of yourself and in the open over Mr. Ashover. I can’t explain to you what it’ll mean to me, William, to be free of this horrid sense that you’re doing something shameful and unkind, like this hiding up Netta’s address! It’s made a difference to me already — just our talking freely like this about it! And if we send our telegram and have Netta here I shall feel still happier! I do think, William dear, that none of them have looked to you for your help and advice in their lives, as they naturally might have done, considering, after all, that you are the vicar of the place!”

She watched him anxiously; and a glow of excitement came into her face when she saw that her words had not been without their effect.

“You mustn’t think,” she went on, “that my friendship with Mr. Ashover prevents my seeing how coolly, to say the least of it, both he and Lexie treat you in your position as priest. It’s the one thing about them that I’ve never understood.” She stopped and glanced quickly at him, wondering whether she had let herself go too far.

“I’m glad to have been able to tell you this, William,” she added. “Because I feel so much that it only wants a little more respect on both sides for you and Mr. Ashover to get on splendidly together.”

She had won her point. She knew it as clearly as if he had thrown up both his hands and cried out: “I yield!” Her victory was almost as unexpected as it was complete. She did not estimate, because it was outside her knowledge of the man’s metaphysical mania, the part played in his yielding by his mysterious hostility to Rook’s wife. Still less did she realize how much of it was due to a certain queer tenderness which he had come to feel for Netta herself, a tenderness that was, in the last resort, a kind of sympathy of pariah for pariah, of one child of the people for another child of the people.

“Then I can write the telegram?” she cried impulsively. And making a swift childish clutch at one of Hastings’s hands she raised it to her mouth.

It was this gesture more than anything that she had done which reconciled him to her victory. There is nothing in the world more calculated to establish a man in his own esteem than to feel the lips of a young girl against his fingers! The psychological effect of such a thing, reverting to dim, far-off pre-Homeric times, carries a magic along with it capable of seducing the coldest-blooded philosopher.

Hastings watched her scribbling the telegram on a piece of paper. He heard her muttering aloud those familiar syllables: “Thirteen Walpole Street,” which he had himself been so malignantly and triumphantly whispering under his breath for the last half year. He derived a peculiar physical relief, like the drawing of a piece of rusty iron out of his flesh, at the mere sound of those words on another’s lips, and while his wife rushed out with the telegram to the postman he found himself running up the stairs to his room with a clearer mind and a more lively desire to continue his life’s work than he had felt since the day of Netta’s flight.