John Powys - Ducdame

The voice of the delirious man went on mumbling inanely the classic doggerel:

“Auctor, exsul, and with these

Bos … tigris … interpres …

Canis and anguis … serpens … sus.”

It was as though, having completed his categorical Domesday Book of all life’s progeny, he were waiting in sardonic expectation for the explosion of his train of dynamite.

Nell and Netta both made instinctive movements toward her. There was something treacherous and outrageous to their minds in this arbitrary despoiling of an unconscious man.

“What are you doing, Lady Ann?” cried Netta. “You’re not going to take his book really away, are you?”

“Give it back…. Give it back…. Oh, how dare you?” protested Nell.

There was, however, at that moment such a dangerous light in the eyes of the girl in the doorway that neither of them had the courage to approach her. In any case, so tightly was she holding the book, it could not have been taken from her without a struggle; and the idea of anything of that sort, in the condition in which she was and under the eyes of Hastings, was inconceivable.

“Take it and good luck to ’ee, marm,” threw in Mr. Pod. “And if ’ee do bury it, same as parson did tell ’ee to, me own girt pick what I do use in hard weather be lying under one of they stone seats in porch. I reckon ’twere a good deed if more of them books be put under sod! ’Tis this book-writing what do worrit quiet-lived folks more’n the worst god-danged ale in Dorchester!”

“You’re not too … too tired … to walk home … Lady Ann … are you?” murmured Netta. “Because … I could go and get someone—” She stopped abruptly in the presence of the cold stare which the girl gave her from the door; but she added gallantly, “We are all so thankful to see that you’re safe.”

Ann replied to this only with a general and easy “Good-night,” and descending the stairs with the air of one who has paid a natural and normal visit let herself out into the garden.

A quarter of an hour later and Hastings’s mood had changed again for the worse. The unfortunate man seemed to forget that he himself had wished to give his “Praise of Death” into the arms of a pregnant woman. He began to renew his efforts to break loose from Mr. Pod’s restraining hands. So distressing was it to Nell to see his struggles that she enquired of Netta in a low voice whether it wouldn’t be better to humour him and let him get out into the air.

“There would be no harm as long as we all went with him‚” she whispered.

But Netta opposed this suggestion with stern common sense.

“Nell, it’s impossible,” she retorted. “It’s impossible. He’ll be quieter presently. But if he isn’t you’d better go to the village and get more help.”

The girl’s words were soon justified. Exhausted by his own violence the unhappy philosopher fell at last into a sort of comatose quiescence; and though, as the evening wore on, their hope that he would fall asleep was not fulfilled, there seemed no likelihood that he would make any further attempt that night to get out of the house.

He refused, however, to let Nell undress him; and she had to content herself with seeing him lying, pale and silent, his eyes fixed on the darkening window; while Mr. Pod, seated on a chair by his side, watched over him with respectful patience.

The twilight of that last day of September seemed loth to lose itself in the finality of night. All the various familiar sounds which that particular hour seems to evoke upon a country road — the lowing of cattle, the crying of nocturnal birds, the intermittent barking of a farmyard dog or of a fox in the furze covers — followed on her journey home the solitary figure of Lady Ann, with that closely written volume held tightly under her cloak.

As she walked slowly between the darkening water meadows and the misty stubble fields she became aware, more acutely than was usual with her, of the phantasmal quality of an autumn evening of this kind. The remote fluidity, as if they were being looked at through the windows of a sea king’s palace, of the trees and gates and weir dams which she passed struck her with a sense of beauty that she had never in that particular way experienced before.

She had a queer, vague impression that she was feeling these things not only for herself but for the child within her; and, as this feeling grew upon her, a deep mysterious gratitude to life itself; not to any power beyond life — for she was a woman almost completely devoid of the religious sense — but just to life, life as it was, with everything that it entailed, rose up in her heart so overpoweringly that she actually hummed to herself as she walked along.

She felt chilly, however, as she crossed the wooden bridge and inhaled the mud-scented mist that rose from its surface; and once more that oracular jingle came into her head. “It’s all nonsense,” she thought, “to imagine that those Deformities I saw by the caravan that day uttered a thing like that! Betsy Cooper must have invented it herself. It’s the sort of abracadabra she would think of; especially after listening to that fool of a parson. I sha’n’t say a word of this to Rook or any one!”

By this time she did begin to feel the effects of her long walk; but she was a girl of immense intrepidity and she struggled on gallantly until, crossing the stone bridge by the churchyard, she found herself at her own drive gate.

As it happened there was a pile of burning weeds just outside this gate, one of the growing evidences of Rook’s absentminded submission to the indolence and carelessness of his dependents. She was still thinking of that “Till-book-be-burned” catch of the pseudo-gipsy when her eyes fell upon the great red heart of this smoking heap, glowing with a crimson glow in the damp windless obscurity.

Once more acting on a sudden unpremeditated impulse she removed the volume from beneath her cloak and flung it into the centre of the smouldering heap.

Having done the thing, it was with a fierce and primitive satisfaction that she prodded its pages open with the end of her parasol and watched the ruddy flames leap up and devour them. So bright were these flames as the pages really began shrivelling that she could actually catch a word or two in Hastings’s meticulously clear hand, as they were thus illuminated in their vanishing. She caught the word “nothingness” and the word “equilibrium” and some other word that might have been “dissolution” or “devolution”; and then there were no more intelligible pages left of the life work of the Reverend William Hastings!

She was interested, however, to observe that before falling into dust the last of these pages remained as thin blackened ghosts within the licking tongues of the fire; ghosts of written sheets, upon which she still could trace unreadable hieroglyphs and indecipherable signs; signs that were the bodiless revenants of those irrefutable arguments with which the theologian had demolished the universe that begat him, hieroglyphs that were like long-necked cormorants flying over a gulf into which Time and Space had sunk.

She left the heap of burning weeds and moved slowly, very slowly, toward the house. She began to be aware that the exhaustion, which made her body feel like something that was made of pulseless wool but at the same time was as heavy as sods of turf, was now accompanied by other, more disturbing symptoms.

Lady Ann bit her lip and stood for a moment quite still. Then, moving on steadily and quietly across the lawn, she mounted the familiar steps of the entrance to the house and opened the door into the hall.

Here she swayed and staggered; and finally fell half-fainting into one of the great mahogany hall chairs inscribed with the armorial bearings of the House of Ashover!