John Powys - Ducdame

“I think the most delicious moments of my life,” said Rook dreamily, “if I put aside the very best of our excursions together, have come when I’ve been walking by myself along some road I’ve never seen before. Are you listening, Lexie?”

His brother bent over the railing to watch the course of a bit of wood which he had flung into the water. He lifted up his head presently. “One minute!” he remarked. “Don’t forget what you were going to tell me; but I want to see”—and he flung another piece of wood after the first—“I want to see whether it’s Rook or Lexie who gets safe under the bridge!”

Rook leaned over the white-washed railing by his side. The Frome ran shallow and weedy just there. A few slender dace, with their heads upstream, were letting the current carry them languidly backward; while at the side of the river, where the water ran over clear sunlit pebbles, a great shoal of minnows were hovering and darting, like little tongues of quicksilver.

“There we go!” cried Lexie, giving his brother one of those looks of complicated naïveté and subtlety which always troubled Rook’s mind, as if with the tantalizing proximity of some dimension of human goodness and sweetness which was only offered to be snatched away. “There we go!” And he ran across “Foulden Bridge” to the other side. Rook followed him, puzzled at the eagerness with which he himself, too, awaited the issue of this childish contest.

“I’m out! I’m safe!” cried the younger Ashover, pointing with his stick. Then in a moment his face assumed a most curious mixture of condolence and triumph. “But you’re stuck fast under there! You’re done for, Rook!”

The elder man did at that second of time undergo an unusual and very unexpected sensation, a perfectly direct and unmitigated shock of self-pity, as if he had been suddenly condemned to leave a world full of beauty and happiness.

“Well? Shall we go on?” said Lexie. “I’m glad it was you and not I who sank, because that means that we shall be together this time next year.”

They moved on across the bridge. The road stretched straight in front of them with nothing but the small white square of Toll-Pike Cottage, far away on the left, to break its perspective till it lost itself in the dim autumnal blur, haze-wrapped and purple-shadowed, of Ashover village.

They moved very slowly now, arm-in-arm, scattering the dust with their feet. Each time they prodded the ground with their sticks little white clouds arose, that subsided patiently and sadly after they passed, like the sighs of disappointed watchers.

“What a place in the imagination,” said Rook suddenly, “has come to be taken by dust. Doesn’t it always return to your mind, that scene in Syria, when the Lord stopped and wrote in the dust?”

Lexie swung round. “You mean when He spat in the dust and made clay! It certainly is strange how every incident of that life falls in with the commonest omens of any walk you go. What were you just going to say on the bridge, Rook, when I interrupted you?”

The elder brother frowned. “Oh, nothing,” he said crossly; but after a pause and in an abstracted tone, “I was wanting to clear up a thing that’s always puzzled me. What is it you feel when you’re alone on a strange road, especially when it leads up over a bare hill? Do you suppose it’s an atavistic memory from times when people were more nomadic and more isolated than they are to-day? Or do you think that all the feelings of solitude, accumulated from many generations, are gathered up then; as if there were a person in each of us who was like a kind of Wandering Jew, with a consciousness entirely made up of the vague, faint, half-human impressions of loneliness, a person whose whole long mysterious life, reaching through many centuries, were one solitary journey?”

In place of answering him Lexie pulled him round by the arm and they stood for a while looking back. All the familiar objects that they looked at then — the wooden bridge with its white palings, the dark-green alders by the sheep wash, the square tower of the church, the gray-stone bridge, the clump of thick-foliaged trees that hid Ashover House — all these things that each of them had known from childhood fell into a new and unfamiliar setting, as if they had been discovered off-guard, in some secretive mood that they had been at pains to conceal.

“Don’t you feel,” said Rook, “that we might be at this moment two characters in one of Grimms’ fairy stories? Haven’t you got that odd feeling, that you get in those stories, as if there were nothing really vulgar or banal in the whole world? As if we might see an old woman driving a goose over that first bridge and a man with a pack on his back crossing this second bridge, and every door in the village ready to open to the cooking of magic cakes and the purring of great wise all-knowing cats! It’s what comes from living in the same spot all one’s life and then suddenly seeing everything as if you’d never seen it before. The only way to escape from vulgarity and commonness is to live all one’s days in a place like Ashover.” He stopped and drew a long breath. “I don’t think I really should care very much,” he added, “if I should never go ten miles away from here until I died!”

They turned their faces once more toward the village and walked on together without further speech till they came to Toll-Pike Cottage.

Lexie’s anticipations were justified. They found Netta and Nell seated together in the little front garden. They were able to observe the two girls several seconds before they were themselves seen or heard owing to the muffling softness of the white dust and the fact that the women were engaged in an intimate and agitating conversation.

As the brothers watched them across the fence there came into Lexie’s mind that peculiar sense of the passing of time which so often seized and arrested him. That he and Rook on this particular day of September should catch sight of those two, Nell in her white summer frock and Netta in black, talking so earnestly and anxiously, with the little round bed of red geraniums in front of them and the window of Hastings’s study open above their heads, seemed to be one of those events that, common enough in themselves, are yet pregnant in some peculiar way with an unforgettable significance.

“Rook is right,” thought Lexie, “about living in Ashover. It’s the fact of one’s knowing every stick and stone in the background of events that gives to events their heightened value. To get the passing of time one has to possess a dial‚ as it were, on which the hours are marked!” They opened the gate and entered the garden.

Lexie found it piquant to watch this meeting between Netta and his brother. “ There are those two,” he thought, “solemnly shaking hands and gravely discussing some indifferent matter, when a year ago they were sharing the same room and using the same water jug.”

His thoughts were impinged upon by a very serious communication from Nell.

“We’re worried about William to-day,” she said. “He’s been writing at that book of his without cessation for the last twelve hours. He got up early this morning, before I was awake, and we haven’t been able to persuade him to come to any meals.”

“Has he eaten anything?” enquired Lexie.

“Hardly anything. I took him some milk and biscuits. He hasn’t locked the door. But when I go in he looks so wild and haggard and gets so angry at being disturbed that I daren’t stop more than a minute. I’m afraid for his mind if he goes on like this. He sat up till three or four this morning. He couldn’t have slept more than two hours. And I didn’t like what he said when I went in.”

“What did he say?”