John Powys - Ducdame

The face at her window may have been a creation of her over-excited nerves; but before she fell asleep at last, in the early dawn, she had immersed all the recent impressions of her London life in these earlier associations; associations saturated with the sights and sounds of the country, and full of a sadness that was more wistful, if not less bruising, than the kind of wretchedness she had superimposed upon it.

The faint light of the dawn as it filled the small attic window with a cold, pale, watery blueness, like the blueness of polished steel, merged with the great concentrated secret thought which had been sustaining her all that agitating day.

She dreaded her meeting with Rook more for his sake than for her own. What would his reaction be to what she had to make him understand? Why, oh, why, she thought, did things that were so clear, so simple, so indisputable, to one human mind, become so strange, so foreign, so insane, when communicated to another?

With something more than the hard bones of ivory skulls were human beings divided, each from each! And she flung out against the pallid, bluish dawn a last desperate prayer that that particular queer-shaped skull that had so often lain by her side should not prove impervious to what she had to communicate to the consciousness within it!

IT WAS the last day of September. The Ashover brothers were seated side by side under Lexie’s elm tree in the churchyard, the back of the younger propped up against the trunk, that of the elder against an anonymous tombstone.

The day was misty and warm. The early afternoon shadows had that purplish haze and dew-wet mistiness over their dark outlines on the grass which dwellers in the west of England have long learnt to associate with the red berries of traveller’s joy and the white clusters of old-man’s-beard! It was one of those days when the filmy seeds of dandelions move at random, without the stirring of a breath, from resting place to resting place; when the purple tufts of knapweed reveal the hard globulous husk below the petals; when the ragwort droops heavily over the mole heaps; when the dominant odour upon the air seems to be a blending of burning weeds and rain-soaked funguses.

“Are you sure she told you all she told me?” Rook was saying, in a voice that seemed as if it might have been the very epitome of that autumnal season, so languid and spiritless did it sound.

“Good Lord, Rook! How can I tell what she told you?” rapped out the other. “The thing is clear enough, anyhow. Those Anglican fathers must have got hold of her soon after she disappeared. She’s had more than six months of their confounded chatter. The wonder is that they haven’t spoilt her more than they have. You know what I’m like over these things; how tough and hard to be fooled I am? And though I can’t forgive them for putting their nonsense into the mind of a sweet creature like that, I have to admit that it’s the genuine thing with her. And I expect, too, it has given her a new interest.” He paused and frowned meditatively. “I expect it’s been for the best, Rook,” he added gravely.

“Did she say anything to you about wanting to join some order?” asked the elder brother.

“She mentioned it as a possibility. But as far as I could make out, these Fathers, whoever they are, weren’t encouraging it. I suppose they want her for other purposes. Oh, I don’t like it — I don’t like it, Rook!”

Rook recalled his own recent talk with Netta in Toll-Pike Cottage; and he also felt that he “didn’t like it.” Indeed, that was putting what he had gone through during that interview very much too mildly.

The encounter had been to him like a draught of coloquintida. It had been one of the master ironies of his life. He had rushed to greet his former mistress with an exultant sense of reconciliation and recovery. He had met her with a glowing wave of tenderness; and then in place of the answering tide of renewed loyalty, in place of the clinging and pathetic affection he had expected, he had been received by a completely different Netta; a Netta who treated their former life as if it had been sin; a Netta who took it for granted that thenceforth to the end of his days he was going to be faithful to Lady Ann!

The situation had been made doubly ironical by the fact that it had been impossible to conceal from his wife that the girl had come back. He had brought the news out boldly and frankly and there had been a distressing scene between them about it; a scene that had been repeated afterward with even more unpleasant nuances of misunderstanding when he had tried to explain the new and unexpected attitude toward him in which his mistress had returned.

Ann had never been more hard, more unyielding, more brutally cynical. She took the line, or pretended to take the line, that the whole thing was an elaborate pretence or pose on Netta’s part. She treated him as if he were a clumsy and conceited victim of a masterpiece of calculated cajolery from an astute adventuress. She flatly refused to see Netta or to listen to any further explanations of her return. “ C’est fini! C’est fini! ”she had said with a wave of her hand when he brought the matter up for the third time.

“I saw Nell yesterday for a moment—”

Rook’s thoughts had been wandering so far that he felt as if these words of his brother’s had been spoken hours ago instead of a minute since.

“It was Nell who got her address out of him and wired to her to come,” said Rook. “Just think of it! It seems difficult to believe that all these things have happened since you and I talked in this very place last November.”

“That great full moon!” responded the other. “And I thought I shouldn’t last out to the end of the summer; and here we are nearly in October! God! I’m glad to be still alive in this world; able to eat a tasty bit of pigeon pie as well as another; and to bustle over for a bit of back-chat with brother Rook of a fine autumn afternoon! By the way, Twickenham maintains that I must be getting a mania for morphia. He says I finished my last box a couple of weeks too soon!”

The elder Ashover’s fingers instinctively pressed a little cardboard object in his waistcoat pocket; but all he said was: “I hope you’ll need those things less and less as time goes on.”

“I’ve had to go a bit slow on cigarettes this last month,” remarked Lexie, striking a match and lighting one as he spoke with more than his usual deliberation. “My bill with Twiney was terrible, as you may imagine,” he added, watching the heavy-scented circles of smoke ascend into the thick autumnal air.

Rook glanced at him with sardonic solicitude. “I could just manage to lend you five or six pounds,” he muttered, “but of course it’s really Lady Ann’s money.”

“Oh, I shall get on,” chuckled the other. “You’ll want every penny you’ve got when this child of hers appears. Have you decided upon a nurse yet?”

Rook sighed heavily and looked away over the familiar water meadows, over that level plain of grass and reeds which had been so often “a bank and shoal of time “for his mind’s escape. There came over him a grievous sense of being divided from his brother as they had never been divided before. This new responsibility, even if it were his wife’s money that dealt with the material side of it, was something that in a subtle and invisible manner ended his old bachelor association with Lexie. His life with Netta had not impinged upon that at all; had been, in fact, only a more extravagant case of the amorous adventures that in the old days had consolidated their friendship, giving it that heathen predatory touch which adds quality and piquancy and substance, as if they were fellow huntsmen in the same perilous jungle! But this allusion to the nurse of his child, carrying the implication that thenceforward he was bound up with deep traditional issues independent of Lexie altogether, seemed to signify the definite end of something and the definite beginning of something else, seemed to stand out like a great ambiguous signpost in his days — like that obscure “Gorm” signpost; meaning nothing, yet meaning everything!