John Powys: Ducdame

He bowed his head still lower over the parapet, deriving a fierce pleasure from thus yielding himself up to the mysterious caprice of the blind, soulless, formless element which knew no difference between a living human skeleton and the inanimate blocks of smooth quarried stone. His mind, always abnormally sensitive to physical sensations, began to detach itself from any definite train of thought; began to disembody itself and unsheathe itself, until it seemed to arrive at a naked airy freedom which enabled it to mingle with the dark flow of that invisible gurgling water and with the seething downpour of that inundating deluge.

Drowning! That was the ultimate sensation he craved; drowning in these vast inhuman elements that obeyed no master and had no purpose or object or obligation; but only drifted and drifted, on and on, up and down, as the unknown reservoirs of subhuman force sucked them in.

Oh, with what happiness he could imagine himself floating — dead — dead — dead — down that current of dark swollen water! No more responsibilities, no more decisions, no more miserable remorse!

That mysterious country of the underworld of which the Greek wanderer had his vision, coming to it at last through those Cimmerian mists, may after all have held a shadowy correspondence with something that really did exist!

If so, it was surely there, surely under those gray willows and among those tall grasses, that the land of untroubled twilight awaited him, whose margins he had so often approached, caught in quick strange glimpses, along the Frome-side roads and the green Frome-side lanes!

He stood erect and looked about him. The rain began rapidly to diminish now, moving away over the valley toward the east with the same capricious suddenness as that with which it had first arrived.

He crossed the bridge and walked on to the entrance into the churchyard.

He hesitated here for a while, his mind returning to his wife and to that devastating sense of a woman’s absolute loneliness at these hours which had driven him forth by a kind of shame. How wicked it was, how dark, how heathen, that mock sympathy which his mother and Pandie had displayed! How horrible this deep, blind, pitiless understanding that women had of one another at such moments — an understanding that was not tenderness or pity but something else; something that came to the surface at these times from the subterranean abysses of nature.

“Ann — my dear sweet Ann — bear it a little longer, just a very little longer, and you’ll be happier than you ever dreamed was possible!”

So he said in his heart, making of his craving to relieve her in her travail a sort of desperate conscious prayer, directed to no deity and to no demon, but to the vast night itself, oldest of all divinities, accomplice alike of the birth of grass blades in the wet dew of Titty’s Ring and of the birth of planets in the cold emptiness of space.

Then it occurred to him that he would like, on this night of the birth of his first-born, to go for a moment to where his father—“the old man” with whom he had had a lifelong feud — lay stretched out under his six feet of clay.

This irrational yielding to the very tradition against which he had struggled so long came upon him without warning; came upon him as if in reply to an actual summons. He hesitated for a moment longer, shaking his head from side to side and pulling his drenched overcoat tightly round him, while with a grim, rather ghastly smile he stared at the dark roof in front of him, from which the water was now audibly dripping.

He became suddenly conscious, as never before, of the appalling finality of human decisions, even in the least important matter. The water dripped, dripped, dripped, from that sloping roof, upon the enmossed slabs of some enclosed tombstone; and it seemed to him as if it dripped from the eternal wound in the heart of the universe, the wound that nothing could staunch or heal, the original blunder of the gods, the free will of life to will against life.

Shivering now a little, though the rain had quite ceased, and lifting his feet very heavily and with difficulty, as if they were subjected in some special way just then to the law of gravitation, Rook moved up the gravel path and rounded the corner of the building.

There before him, visible in spite of the darkness, was the familiar white headstone; there, too, the well-known trunk of Lexie’s elm. But what struck his mind with a shock of abrupt amazement, struck it with the sort of chill that comes over us when something occurs which resembles the intrusion of the abnormal or supernatural, was the emerging from the church porch of a human figure. He moved forward boldly, however, in pursuit of this figure which proceeded to cross the churchyard to its remote end under the broken wall. There, as he approached it, it assumed the appearance of a woman, a woman who took up a spade which she had left on the ground and began to dig with animal-like rapidity and concentration, throwing the loose earth upon a growing heap at her side.

It was clear she must have been at her task for some while before the rain interrupted her; for the heap of earth at the edge of the hole she was digging showed large and unmistakable in the darkness.

He recognized her now. She was Betsy Cooper. And well enough did he apprehend what she was at; for it had been one of the scandals of the village in his boyhood that Nancy Cooper, his father’s favourite, had been buried somewhere in that quarter without a tombstone; and that even the mound that indicated the place had been flattened out in some orderly but impious tidying up of that particular spot.

He walked straight across to where the old woman was digging. She did not hear him approach and he came close up to her before he spoke.

“Betsy!”

She leaped up at the sound, and drew away trembling, dropping her spade into the hole. When she saw who it was her face became transfigured with wild concern.

“Get ’ee back into house, Squire Ash’ver! Get ’ee back into house while there be time! What be ’ee doing traipsin’ in churchyard when thee’s wife be brought to bed? Get ’ee back, Squire Rook, lest some girt blow fall on ’ee! Hist — hist — dear Squire alive! There be terrible mischief abroad this blessed night for thee and thine. I do know it and I’ve a-told them maidies in kitchen what I do know! Dursn’t one of all thy folk up and tell ’ee what I did say to they afore this same sundown? I’d a-told it to thee wold mother but naught of it and naught of poor Betsy would she bide. Wahay! Wahoh! And that none should heed! Wahoh! And that thee own self should be traipsin’ here, none withholding! Get thee back to house, for the sake of thy own flesh and blood, Squire Ash’ver! Get thee back for Christes’ sake afore ’tis too late!”

The old woman’s agitation was so extreme that she actually waved both her thin arms in the air, while her face assumed the look of some inspired prophetess.

Rook looked at her with grave attention. But, as in the case of a greater than he, there were powers and influences abroad that rendered him obstinately obdurate to her clamour.

“So you’re trying to find Nancy?” he said sternly and quietly, looking down into the hole she had digged.

And as he looked, a sharp spasm came over him and a strange emotion gripped his vitals. In one single flash he got a vision of the whole tragic pity of the human race — these mothers, these children! He saw his own delicately nurtured Ann alone in that bed. He saw this old woman wrestling with the very earth, if so be that she might touch the bones of her child dead twenty, thirty years ago.

“Let my Nancy bide where she be!” cried the hag in desperation. “Look to thee own self, Squire Ash’ver! Look to thee own self and get back to house!”