John Powys - Ducdame

He looked at Lexie’s face as the younger man puffed out those spirals of blue smoke into an air that was thick with diffused colour, like the palette of some planetary Tiepolo; and it came over him that the real mistake of his life was in having departed, one stone’s throw, from the calm epicurean existence of those first years after their father’s death.

What had made him depart from that unruffled backwater, that earthly paradise of equanimity? Well! Just his viciousness; just that desire to round off his life with some feminine person or other who would satisfy those insatiable instincts that in the nature of the case his brother could not satisfy!

Oh! Could he only have foreseen, could he only have foreseen! — If he’d been tough and hard and callous he would have been able to whistle them all down the wind. In that case he would have made love to Ann and kept her at a distance; love to Nell and kept her at a distance; love to Netta and kept her at a distance! It was this fatal mixture in him of viciousness and pitiful sympathy that had ruined his life.

For his life was ruined. He knew that as definitely as if he had seen himself like a dead horse in a field, with Lady Ann and her beautiful offspring battening upon his flesh like two resplendent-winged dragon-flies!

Another person would have considered him the fortunate possessor of a distinguished wife and — he felt sure it would be so — of a distinguished heir to his name. Outwardly, at this moment, especially now that Netta was off his conscience and independent of him, he was a man any one might reasonably envy. Yet here he was, looking yearningly at Lexie’s seamed and weather-stained face, as he might have looked his last at some lovely enchanted island from which a fatal vessel was irrevocably bearing him away!

Ay! Ay! A human being’s life was not a thing of outward possessions, of outward circumstances. It was a thing of a certain secret abiding life illusion, that must be in some measure satisfied or all was lost! His life illusion implied his freedom from every sort of responsibility, except the responsibility of being a good son and a good brother. He was a man born to make women unhappy if he so much as approached them! And yet, how not to approach them, being obsessed, as he was, with this insane impersonal desire? What a dilemma! Why wasn’t it possible to have love affairs with trees, with the elements, as those old classical personages used to have?

Oh, how intensely he loved his brother as he looked at him now! If only he could have exchanged with Lexie; he to be the sick one, the doomed one, and Lexie to be the husband of Lady Ann!

“How did Twickenham say you were when he examined you yesterday?” he asked at length, bringing to an end his prolonged melancholy silence.

“Oh, I thought I’d told you,” replied Lexie eagerly. “He was very pleased — really surprised, you know! He seemed to indicate that I might go on quite comfortably through another year. My peculiar trouble seems to lend itself to these prolongations and postponements. And in my own secret mind — though I don’t want to say the words — I have a sort of instinct that if I do last out one other year, it’ll be damnably hard to unloose my hold upon life!”

Rook looked at him with infinite sympathy. He looked at the enormous size of Lexie’s head, at the depths below depths of life energy in his glaucous coloured eyes, at the sweet, rich; almost feminine curves of his sensitive mouth.

“Lexie,” he began, and stopped suddenly.

“Well, Rook, what is it?”

“I oughtn’t to say a thing like that, I suppose. It’s one of those absolutely outrageous things that Nature lets people think, but that no decent person could possibly bring himself to say!”

“What is it? What is it, Rook?”

“Well, I was just thinking how many lives I would offer up, and whose lives, if the gods would make me absolutely assured that yours would go on for thirty more years!”

Lexie threw away his cigarette and made a face at him. “I wouldn’t have the least objection to this holocaust of yours if I didn’t know for a certainty that, no sooner had you done it you’d begin regretting it! You’re a funny person and I doubt if you realize how far your queerness goes.”

He got up from the ground and yawned. When Lexie yawned he did so with the earthy shamelessness of a wild animal.

“Let’s walk back to my place together, Rook,” he said. “We could stop at Toll-Pike on the way, maybe, and see if either of the girls is in! Old Hastings, Nell tells me, has started off like a maniac at that book of his. She says he writes day and night now; and hardly stops to eat his meals. It’s lucky for her that she has got Netta with her.”

They crossed the graveyard together. “Well! Well!” Lexie continued, “It’s something that you and I are still walking on a good gravel path side by side. I might so easily be now lying under that elm trunk with the beard growing on my chin and evil-smelling rheum running out of my eyes and nostrils! Yet here we are, looking forward to an excellent tea with black-currant jam among my phloxes, and very likely a couple of sweet-natured wenches to enjoy it with us! How any one can ever worry himself about the shuffling of the cards, as long as there are any cards to shuffle — that’s what I cannot understand, brother Rook.”

They emerged into the road and proceeded to wander slowly through its white dust watching the heavy-winged tarnished peacock butterflies flutter before them from silverweed to silverweed.

“Think what it would be like,” said Lexie, “if every human being left a thin silvery trail behind him like the slime of a snail! Think of such a trail crossing and recrossing its tracks from where it first leaves its perambulator to where it climbs into bed for the last time! Our tracks must pretty often have gone over the same ground, side by side along this road. And yet it is an absolute and irrevocable certainty that one of these walks together will be our last.”

Rook’s thoughts were preoccupied at that moment with the stark question, a question that gave him the sensation of looking into a gaping wound which had begun to fester, as to what kind of a tilt or twist or secret palliative he could administer to this truculent life illusion of his, so as to endure Netta’s conversion, his child’s birth, his mother’s senile jubilation, and this indescribable separation from Lexie which Lexie seemed too egoistic and self-absorbed even to notice!

“One of these walks will be our last,” his brother was saying. Didn’t he have the wit to recognize that this “last” had already happened?

They approached the clump of alders that overhung the sheep-washing pool. This was the point where the river turned sharply to the right, heading for the water meadows, and was crossed by a wooden bridge bordered by the same kind of whitewashed railings as skirted the preceding strip of road.

In the centre of this bridge the two brothers came to a pause, leaning against the railing and looking away over the barley fields, now a misty expanse of golden stubble, which sloped up toward Heron’s Ridge.

“Do you remember how we used to call this bridge ‘Foulden’s Bridge,’ for no reason except that we had a nursery-maid called ‘Foulden’ who used to meet that old villain Pod here of a fine summer’s evening?”

Lexie chuckled as he uttered these words with an unctuous comprehensive historic chuckle which “flew low,” so to speak, like a great flopping mallard, over all the days of all the years of both their lives!

Rook did not trouble himself to answer this particular remark. The two brothers were so content in each other’s society that they had a way of thinking aloud; each one pursuing his own deep-indented furrow of contemplation; quite satisfied if now and again these isolated trails crossed one another, like Lexie’s silvery snail tracks!