John Powys - Ducdame

Had Lady Ann been a more neurotic or a weaker person this agitating encounter would have been actually dangerous to her. As it was, so robust was her constitution and so defiant her temper, it seemed rather to hearten her and steady her than to do her any harm.

It did cross her mind as she left the lane and made her way through the stubble fields toward the village that she was at that crisis in her life singularly alone. Her own parents were dead. Mrs. Ashover was her nearest relative; and the girl was far too sagacious not to know that it was in the rôle of a mother of future Ashovers rather than in the rôle of a daughter to herself that the old tribal fanatic cherished her.

Alone. Well? What of that? Many a Norse ancestor of hers had been alone ere now, both on land and sea, and that fact had not weakened the strength of his arm or blurred his clear, unclouded glance into the shifty eyes of Fate!

Besides, she was not alone! Rook might have a cold and fickle heart. His mother might be obsessed by the family. Very well! Let them go. She carried her champion, her supporter, her ally, here in her own vitals!

She was at the top of the ridge now and beginning to feel exhausted. That young Viking in her belly was displaying his strength — and his sex, too — how sure she was of that! — by certain familiar thumpings and stirrings.

It must be getting on toward tea-time. The autumn sun already rested, red and glowing, like a vast eye-socket veiled in titanic sorrow, on the treetops behind the Drools’ cottage.

The church and churchyard down there in the valley were gathered now in thick woolly mists, and as she looked at them she remembered the peculiar psychic support which more than once those dead people there had seemed capable of giving her.

Well! Weary though she was, she was so mysteriously self-subsistent at that moment that she felt strong enough to steer her vessel onward without assistance, or even sympathy, from any quarter.

As she came slowly down the stubble field with its faint strawy smell and its little tufts of fumitory and small wild yellow pansies she had a strange fierce longing for the unknown travail that was to come upon her. She felt associated so closely with her child in this struggle that it was almost as if two lovers, of proud Spartan breed, were preparing for an engagement with a barbarous enemy!

Never for one second did she contemplate the possibility of her death. The life force in her seemed so inexhaustible, so potent, that it tossed such thoughts aside, as a racehorse might toss the foam from his mouth and nostrils.

She soon reached the hawthorn hedge where she had met Rook on the occasion of her visit to Toll-Pike. She smiled faintly as she thought of that unenjoyed lunch! And she said to herself with stark sincerity, “How can Rook and Lexie find anything to attract them in that sentimental, funny-looking little thing?”

She sat down to rest on the identical spot where she had rested before. The hedge protected her from the rising mists, and the ground was still warm except where the longer grass had caught the dew. With her cloak wrapped round her she sank luxuriously back against the furrow of sweet-smelling earth mould. The largeness of that autumn day, its indrawn breath, its immense passivity, lulled her into a delicious relaxation.

She lay there for nearly an hour, living intensely and absorbingly in the great parturient process that was going on within her. Then, at last, feeling the approach of the evening chill, she rose to her feet, and, rested and comforted in mind and body, pushed open the ancient ramshackle gate into the remembered barley field.

It was then that quite suddenly, and, as it were, quite naturally, that tiresome, ungrammatical refrain, “Till book be burned no child’ll be borned,” repeated itself in her ears as if someone at her very side had whispered it.

Lady Ann became grave and stood motionless, like a beautiful animal scenting some species of ambiguous danger. “What’s up with me?” she thought to herself. “Is this nerves? Or am I growing superstitious?”

And then without reasoning about it at all she suddenly felt an irresistible instinct driving her to go straight down to Toll-Pike Cottage and face this life-hating conjurer whose sorcery was so inimical to herself and her child.

She tried to find, for her own justification, some quite reasonable motive for stopping at Toll-Pike Cottage just then; nor was such a motive very difficult to find. She felt not the slightest embarrassment at being seen either by Nell or Hastings in her present condition. As for Netta’s presence there, she did not permit it to affect her one way or the other. Her attitude to both these rivals of hers was that of an indifferent conqueror of superior race, whose caprices may be indulged to the furthest limit in sublime contempt for any reaction, favourable or unfavourable, that they might produce on the vanquished.

It did not take her long to reach the cottage. This time there was no Marquis of Carabas lying on the back porch. But Lady Ann did not intend to enter in that unconventional manner this time. She walked round to the front door and rang the bell. To her surprise she heard excited and agitated voices in the room above.

She waited. No one seemed to have noticed her ring. There was evidently something serious going on upstairs.

Was this crazy priest quarrelling with these two women? Was he ill-using them, perhaps? All her social instincts as a member of the English ruling class rose up in indignation. It was no more to her then that Rook had taken his pleasure with these girls than if they had been daughters of Twiney or of Pod! What was unpardonable was that in the village of Ashover, within a mile of Ashover House, an English clergyman should be behaving like a drunken blacksmith. For it was that. She was not country-born for nothing. She had heard so often that particular mingling of female clamour with masculine threats from under the eaves of thatched cottages, as she rode home, dreamy and content, through Sturminster, through Shaftesbury, through Stalbridge, from a successful hunt with the Blackmore pack!

With her practical and realistic mind she came to the prompt conclusion that in “his weakness and his melancholy” this hedge priest of theirs had taken to drink. Accustomed from her earliest childhood to high-handed interference, and entirely free from any physical apprehensions on her own behalf, the intrepid girl boldly turned the handle of the door, entered the little hallway, and walked resolutely and unflinchingly up the narrow staircase.

Her steps on the stairs were no more audible to the persons in that room than had been the sound of her ring. She heard scuffling and struggling in there as well as this turmoil of voices.

With a quick movement of her strong young wrist she turned the handle of the door and swung it wide open. The sight that met her eyes was disturbing enough; though it was not quite on a par with the violent ruffianism she had been imagining. Like all people of her kind she lumped the middle classes and the proletariat together, and took for granted that any of them might at any moment break all laws of decency and self-respect.

She was not surprised, therefore, to see William Hastings with a white distorted countenance struggling to release himself from the arms of Mr. Pod, who, very red in the face and obviously much embarrassed at being found in such a situation, was holding the priest down on a sofa-bed.

This article of furniture must have been recently dragged in from the room opposite, for it was placed awkwardly and grotesquely between the philosopher’s desk and the round table in the centre of the chamber.

On one side of this makeshift bed stood Netta, evidently doing her best to soothe the afflicted man; while at its foot, leaning across it so as to touch her husband’s hands with her own, was the slender form of Nell, from whose eyes the tears were streaming and whose whole body was trembling with agitation and concern.