John Powys - Ducdame

“Lordy! Your Ladyship did give I a start!” cried the breathless sexton, relaxing his hold upon the man on the bed. “Us all thought as you was drownded in sheep wash or summat!”

“Thank God, you’re all right, Lady Ann,” said Netta gravely, glancing anxiously down at the man beneath her to see that he did not take advantage of this new apparition to make a fresh struggle to escape.

But Hastings was staring at Ann with wild intensity, every line in his face expressive of the passing of one complicated emotion after another across the clouded mirror of his mind. He had worked at the completion of his book so passionately that now it was finished the actual volume itself, its leather binding, its ink-stained pages, had become to his unsettled brain a magical engine of destruction, a nihilistic catapult as it were, that it now behoved him to hurl at the citadels of life!

Two of these life ramparts had got themselves lodged in his mind as especially challenging to his campaign — those Ashover tombs in the church chancel, and the living body of Lady Ann Ashover! From those tombs, Hastings had come to be obstinately convinced, emanated the very essence of this unscrupulous life force, which in its relentless strivings disturbed the placid pools of non-existence. And here was Lady Ann herself, now standing before him, the incarnation of the remorseless urge! With the extravagant fanaticism of a mad logician, Hastings formulated, even as he looked at the woman, a monstrous and diabolic project. He would make her herself hug to her heart his “Book of Annihilation,” and carry it to the place of those living dead.

To his distorted vision this hurling of his book among his enemies presented itself as the supreme stroke in an abysmal spiritual warfare whereof he was the protagonist and this woman, big with child, the antagonist.

The man’s intellectual magnetism was so great that as he sat up there in bed with the veins in his forehead distended and his face quivering with conflicting emotion the four persons in that room remained awed and silent. When he did speak it was with a mingling of insane cunning and disordered impetuousness.

“They won’t let me take it and hide it!” he cried. “I want to hide it under those chancel slabs … I could easily get up those stones and put it there; but they won’t let me! And now you’ve come and you’ll join with them. If you hadn’t come I’d have done it. Wouldn’t I have done it, fellow?” And he turned his distracted glance upon the embarrassed Mr. Pod, who stood watching him with one of his great fists ostentatiously clenched, as if Hastings were a troublesome bullock at Tollminster Fair.

“’Tis true enough, your ladyship, what Parson do say,” acquiesced the sexton. “’A would have rinned all the way to church and have scrabbled with’s own hands at they paving stones! ’A would have done that; and maybe heaved up some of they ancient Squires what do bide under them moniments! ’Tis God’s truth what ’a do say, your ladyship. ’A be a terrible strong man, and there be none to hold ’un but only I and these two young leddies!”

Lady Ann became suddenly aware of the actual presence of Hastings’s book. The manuscript occupied a large leather-bound volume as big as a business ledger, and it lay on the priest’s desk just above his bed. She knew the look of the book, as she had seen it in his hands before; and she surveyed it now with a peculiar and unusual interest.

Nell, who was standing at the foot of the bed, caught the direction of the visitor’s glance.

“My husband had just finished his last chapter, Lady Ann, when this idea of hiding it in the church came into his head. You feel better now, William, don’t you? You won’t frighten us again, will you, William?”

The man rose a little higher on the bed, straightening his legs and propping himself up on his two hands. He stared at Nell’s face with that pathetic and puzzled frown with which people whose mental processes have grown jangled become for a moment aware of something wrong and unusual.

It was as if he were peering helplessly at the young girl through the entangled boughs of his own obscuring delusion. Fancying that he did hear her and understand her Nell flung herself down on her knees at his side and began chafing one of his hands.

Lady Ann exchanged glances with Netta; but neither of them, nor indeed Mr. Pod himself, who looked as if he would be thankful if the floor sank beneath him, seemed anxious to intervene between these two.

Lady Ann’s thoughts wandered off to all that buried dust under the church pavement which seemed to be so persistent an influence in the movement of events in this place. She recalled the man’s wild discourse to her on New Year’s Eve, at the end of Marsh Alley, and how he had associated, even then, the negations of his ferocious logic with the extinction of the House of Ashover. He was disarmed and innocuous enough now; but she, in her sanity, began just then, as she saw the book lying there within her reach, to be betrayed into the same illusion as the one which this madman held, namely, that this mysterious destructive force had actually passed from the living man’s intellect into the inanimate potency of the work he had just completed.

Once more that jingle of Betsy’s—“Till book be burned no child’ll be borned”—sounded in her brain with the appalling distinctness of a warning sea bell rocked by rising waves.

Nell was keeping up, in a kind of crooning tone, a sort of lullaby to the man on the bed. She seemed to forget the presence of the others.

Suddenly Hastings bent forward, stretched out his arm, and possessed himself of the volume on the desk. He turned over some of its pages with a sort of malignant awe; while a moment later with a glance at Lady Ann that had a flicker of demonic subtlety in it, he tossed the book down at the foot of the bed.

Then it seemed as if he forgot its existence; for he began to talk incoherently of certain early memories of his in the slums of London. He mentioned names that were completely strange to them all; and with those names he mixed the names of Latin writers and the titles of Latin books. And he talked of the lily pond in Kew Gardens, which must have been the. objective of some thrilling childish excursion. And then he muttered something about park railings, with deer behind them. “Let me feed them, Mother! Let me feed them!” he cried out in a loud voice; and then, without any apparent connection, he began reciting the old grammar-school tag:

“Common are to either sex

Artifex and oppifex,

Conviva, vates, advena,

Testis, civis, incola,

Parens, sacerdos, custos, vindex,

Adolescens, infans, index,

Judex, haeres, comes, dux,

Princeps, municeps, conjux!”

Mr. Pod manifested considerable apprehension when he heard these strange syllables. He looked from one to another of the three ladies as if he expected them to call upon him to clap his great hand over the mouth of the delirious man.

“This do come of praying and preaching,” he whispered in an awestruck voice. “Parson be calling upon the Lord in Greek and Hebrew, same as ’tis writ the Blessed Saviour did. ’Tis enough to make a man’s wits turn to have to say ‘Dearly Beloved’ and ‘Scripture moveth us in sundry places’ every seventh day, wet or fine! ’Tis a wonder more on ’em don’t start hollerin’ and forgetting theyselves!”

Lady Ann heard these words of the sexton with the sort of attention a starving man on a raft might give to the screaming of a sea gull while his companions were casting lots as to which of them should die first.

The sight of that volume lying at the foot of the bed obsessed her with an irresistible fascination. Suddenly she could endure it no longer; and, without a word said, she just slipped forward a couple of steps, snatched up the volume, thrust it under her arm beneath her cloak and moved quickly back to the open door.