Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  The elder man’s sullenness did melt at this.

  “The upshot will be that you and I will be the last of the Ashovers,” he remarked grimly.

  Lexie’s resemblance to the least heroic of the Cæsars became strikingly marked.

  “Mother hasn’t said anything more, has she?” he enquired anxiously. “God! It was awful when she actually talked of you and Netta before Ann. Rook, tell me. Would you send Netta away and marry Ann if I went over to the enemy? Or would you hold out even against me?”

  His brother seemed to regard this question as unworthy of any serious answer. He simply disregarded it.

  “You’re sure you do right in risking these walks, my dear?” He touched Lexie’s forehead as he spoke and ran his fingers through the young man’s thick hair as if he had been a woman.

  “I can’t help feeling,” he went on, “that you may, after all, be sacrificing everything by not doing what that doctor said. As long as we’re together you’ll always be tempted to go beyond your strength; and I’m the worst person in the world for the business of reminding you. I can’t realize things as I ought. I forget so.”

  Lexie had begun fumbling once more with one of the buttonholes of his brother’s overcoat; but he dropped his hand now.

  “I’m as fit as a badger in Field-Cover!” he cried. “It’s when you talk like that——”

  The malignant mechanism of chance stopped the words in his mouth.

  He swayed a little and bent his head, poking automatically with his stick at the mud under his feet which showed faint traces of frost marks.

  Rook clutched at his shoulder.

  “Lexie, don’t! Lexie, what is it? You’re not going to faint, are you?”

  But the young man had already gained his composure.

  “Let’s go into the churchyard‚” he said, taking his brother’s arm.

  They moved together through the gate and followed the path that led to the base of the tower.

  “Do sit down for a bit,” pleaded Rook. “It frightens me when you get like that.”

  “Here? Near the old man?” and Lexie made a scarcely perceptible grimace in the direction of their father’s grave.

  “Yes; here.”

  And they sat down side by side on a flat tombstone, the name and date of which had been obliterated by many Novembers.

  The rank autumnal grass in the uncut portion of the enclosure rose before them in the moonlight or lay in tangled swathes on the ground like the uncombed hair of a titanic skull.

  The bent stems and rain-battered leaves of the hedge parsley that grew where the graves ended resembled now an enchanted Lilliputian forest through which some fairy beasts had trampled, leaving it outraged and desolate.

  There was only one tree in that portion of the churchyard, a very old elm, lopped and beheaded and almost leafless, but with a trunk of such sturdy proportions and so deeply indented that it resembled the torso of a gigantic pillar, half buried in the earth but still bearing witness to its old obscure importance.

  The two men contemplated this colossal relic, their attention drawn to it by a low sound that suddenly emerged from its headless jagged top and died away.

  “Do you hear?” whispered Lexie. “What’s that? There’s no wind. There’s something alive up there.”

  They both listened intently but the sound was not repeated.

  “It’s queer to think of these women—Nell, Netta, Cousin Ann, and our mother—all lying in their beds in the moonlight and all agitated in some way over you.”

  “Damn you, Lexie! Why over me? Why the devil not over you? With all this refusing to do what Twickenham tells you and all this walking too far, there’s enough in your goings-on to keep every one of us awake at night.”

  He had hardly spoken the words when, with a wild tumbling of soft feathery wings, a couple of brown owls flew out of the headless tree. One flew straight across the water meadows; while the other, swinging round and rising over the heads of the two men, vanished behind the masonry of the tower.

  “Netta is absurd about owls,” said Rook. “She says that she must have been a field mouse once and owls ate her. I tell her that she was much more likely a great stoat who ate little owls. What are you laughing at, you devil? I suppose you think Netta hasn’t the brain of a sparrow? And you think she can’t appreciate the country? And you think. I’m making an absolute idiot of myself by having her here?”

  “We needn’t go into all that now,” responded Lexie. “Have a cigarette?” And with a series of movements that were concentrated in their punctiliousness he proceeded to light a match.

  Rook shook his head. But he watched with curious interest the tiny Promethean flame lift up its eternal living protest between cold moonlight and cold mortality.

  They were both silent for a space. Then Lexie suddenly uttered the words: “The left side would be better than the right.”

  Rook stared blankly at the little rings of smoke that followed one another into the phantasmal air.

  “What on earth are you talking about? What left side?”

  Lexie deposited a carefully preserved ash end upon the stone between them, where the little gray heap lay undisturbed, like the excrement of a wandering moon moth.

  “Of the tree, brother Rook‚” he said, contorting the imperial ruggedness of his face into one of his humorous grimaces; “of the tree. And don’t let the matter pass out of your forgetful mind! Mother’s sure to want to bury me over there by the old man. And I don’t want to be buried there. I want to be on the left side of the tree. Only for the Lord’s sake let me lie deep. You know what elms are! It’s one of those funny tricks of Nature; like the throats of whales. Monstrous trunks; and then silly little tendrils hardly bigger than turf-roots. I don’t want to be exposed, brother Rook. So get that fixed in your mind. The left side of the tree; and seven feet down!”

  The voice of the sick man died away into space; just as, a little while before, the fluttering of the owls had died away. Both sounds were now travelling, at a rate measurable to science, toward the moon. If the vibration of them survived the loss of the earth’s atmosphere it would soon be reaching a point from which, if sounds had sight, the other side of the moon would be visible!

  Some such fantasy as this passed obscurely through Rook’s mind as he delayed his response.

  In his abstracted fashion he sent his soul wandering over the wide expanse of water meadows, intersected by reedy ditches, which lay beyond the low wall of the churchyard.

  He could actually feel the chill of those cold fields, of those flooded ditches, as if his mind had the power of carrying his senses with it on such a voyage. He seemed to himself to become a moving nebulous shadow, acting as sentinel to the very floor of silence upon which the world is built.

  What he felt most conscious of at that moment was not the menace of mortality by which his brother was threatened, but the indrawn breath of multitudes upon multitudes of grass blades, full of the pallid greenish sap of that late season‚ that seemed answering the attraction of the moon with a conscious answer; just as the vast swaying sea growths are said to do under their fathoms of salt water.

  “Why do you keep harping upon death?” he said at last. “Lots of people with your particular trouble live for years and years. You’ll probably see me buried by the side of the old man long before they disturb the roots of your elm for you.”

  Lexie looked at him with the peculiar look that death-threatened people have in the presence of the ultimate treachery. The luminousness that surrounded them made it impossible that Rook could miss that look—a look that begged and pleaded, a look that howled, like a dog driven to its kennel.

  “This is my last November,” the look said, “and I love every moment of every hour of life!”

  “Can’t you see that I am sinking into absolute loneliness?” the look said. “Hold me! Clutch me! Save me!”

  Rook glanced at his brother; saw the look; but still continued to allow his soul to wander over the fields.
He wanted his brother to die least of all things in the world. He could not imagine life without him. And yet in some mysterious way, just because of the ghastly threat to the bond between them, he experienced an actual enhancing of the beauty of that night.

  Something in the depths of his nature gathered itself together under his brother’s words, focussed itself, roused itself to a strange pitch of exaltation. The white tombstones, the headless tree, the motionless shadow of the tower, the spellbound meadows, became so beautiful to him that death itself seemed hardly less beautiful.

  Those pastures seemed to stretch away and away, until they crossed the borderline between death and life. They seemed to reach out to something dim and vague and wonderful; to some unearthly ghost garden‚ far from all human troubling, where nothing but solemn milk-white cattle moved up and down through a pearl-gray mist, licking every now and then with great languid tongues the drooping rims of huge moon mushrooms.

  There must have been a long silence between the two brothers just then; for when Rook returned to himself it seemed that it was across an immeasurable gulf that his own last words returned to him.

  By one of the quick simultaneous movements of thought that often occurred between them when they were alone together they both fixed their eyes upon their father’s grave.

  It was Lexie who finally put into words the thing that was in their minds.

  “The old man won’t like it if we’re the last of his race. But I suppose that’s nothing to you, Rook.”

  The face of the elder Ashover certainly did not at that moment suggest the passion of piety. Never had it worn more obstinately its characteristic look of truculent abstraction.

  But Lexie was undeterred.

  “Are you absolutely certain,” he said, “that Netta can’t have a child?”

  Rook nodded.

  “You’d marry her, of course, if she did?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And nothing any of us can do or say will ever make you get rid of her?”

  Rook shook his head.

  “Well, for God’s sake, let’s tell the old gentlemen inside that the family’s done for, and see what they say!”

  Lexie rose to his feet as he spoke and, hobbling between the graves, passed into the shadow of the tower.

  Rook came slowly after him. There was an illusory chilliness within the shadow that gave to both men the sensation of crossing the mouth of a sepulchre. And in very definite sense this building was the sepulchre of their people.

  They moved round to the south side of the church and followed the wall till they reached the east end. Then stepping close up to an unstained widow they peered straight into the chancel.

  The moonlight streaming in behind them threw its ghostly light on everything there. The little church looked as if it had been illuminated for some nocturnal office.

  The Norman arch, the carved mediæval niches, the brass lectern, the tall Puritan pulpit, seemed all of them emphatically conscious of some invisible ceremony. Was it an unending platonic dialogue they listened to, between nothingness and the dust of the generations? or did the living souls of all the animate creatures that were asleep just then—men and women under their blankets, cattle under their hurdles, wild fowl under their marsh reeds—gather together “on such a night as this,” a queer, twittering, bleating, weeping, bodiless crowd, animulœ, vagulœ, blandulœ, and hold a secular consistory above those cold slabs?

  There, at any rate, they all lay, the Ashovers of Ashover! Their two descendants, the fair one and the dark one, pressed their foreheads very close to the window and surveyed the well-known marble images and the brass inscriptions on the stone floor.

  The most imposing effigy of them all was that of Benjamin Ashover, the 18th-century Deist, the friend of Voltaire.

  The mortuary grandeur of this sturdy infidel threw all the rest into the shade. Clumsy classical cupids, with less resemblance to cherubs than to wine bottles, supported the plump pillow on which rested the well-shaped, supercilious head; nor could anything exceed the patronizing complacency with which this bewigged unbeliever contemplated his present surroundings!

  Very different was the expression of Sir Robert Ashover, the cavalier victim of Oliver Cromwell.

  Wistful and indignant, in lace collar and embroidered coat, this defender of old illusions stared out of his marble frame with an expression of melancholy surprise at the lack of gentlemanliness, or even of common decency, in “the ways of God to Man.”

  More different still from the philosopher’s smirk was the impenetrable aloofness, stern and forbidding, of Lord Roger of Ashover, the Crusader.

  With his mailed hands crossed, with his hound at his feet, with his unsheathed sword at his side, Lord Roger looked like a man-at-arms of Eternity, deep asleep, while the armies of Time trampled past him.

  “E la sua volontate è nostra pace,” his lips seemed to say under his pointed beard!

  Rook and Lexie drew back together from the window and returned in silence to the gravel path that led to the gate.

  Once outside in the road they both became conscious that the luminous mystery above them had worked some kind of sorcery upon their nerves, had vampirized in some perceptible way their life energy.

  Every grass blade, every tree trunk, every gatepost, was still floating in a lovely transparent liquid trance.

  But when the two men had parted from each other, and Rook, pausing on the bridge to listen to his brother’s dragging footsteps and tapping stick, had become suddenly conscious that there was an alteration in the feel of the air, the echo of Lexie’s final words returned to him.

  “She has never been really friendly to the human race. Never really friendly! It’s a shame we can’t wait here together, brother Rook, until we can smell the dawn!”

  CHAPTER II

  THE rain lashed against the window panes of the dining room of Ashover House. Netta Page sat facing the window in a tall straight-backed chair.

  She had finished her breakfast. She sat with her chin on her hands‚ her elbows on the table‚ her eyes staring in front of her.

  There were no other people in the room. Rook and Lady Ann had breakfasted together earlier. Mrs. Ashover never appeared till midday. The same situation had repeated itself many times already; and these lonely morning meals were by no means distasteful to Netta.

  As she sat now in that straight-backed chair her eyes were fixed steadily on the rain; but her thoughts were focussed on the figure of a little old lady in a black satin dress who had just passed her on the staircase.

  It was not a nice experience to be looked through as if you were transparent and as if the balustrade on the other side of your body were requiring a new coat of paint; but it was a still more unpleasant sensation to be given a glance that resembled a sharp stinging smack on the cheek; and Netta, in recalling these incidents‚ was conscious that her resentment at them was something new; was something different from the weary habitual patience into which the buffets of life had beaten her.

  But this sort of thing had been going on for a year; and she still could be quite happy at certain moments.

  Not one single time, since Rook had brought her to the house, had Mrs. Ashover spoken to her, or smiled at her, or eaten at the same table with her.

  The servants‚ too, old-fashioned and eccentric, had taken their cue from the old lady and had missed no opportunity of making the intruder feel her position.

  Well! that, at any rate, was quite different now. The appearance of Cousin Ann upon the scene had changed all that. Netta did not quite understand Cousin Ann’s kindness. But, on the other hand, she did not suspect it of any hidden treachery. She just accepted it as she had accepted so much else. And it certainly had made the whole difference as far as the servants were concerned. Lady Ann could not apparently coax Mrs. Ashover into a different mood; but she had forced her to retreat from position after position of overt contempt, and she had cast such a spell over the rest of the household that the girl no lon
ger went to and fro among them like a convicted criminal.

  Everybody in the place had felt the new influence. The worst of the village gossips, when they saw the daughter of Lord Poynings grow friendlier and friendlier with “the kept woman,” had begun to wonder if it wouldn’t after all result in Master Rook’s marrying “the poor harmless body.”

  Even that formidable entity “the neighbourhood” showed signs of a certain restlessness under its own verdict. It was one thing to punish the impoverished Ashovers. It was another thing to be denied the pleasure of meeting Ann Wentworth Gore.

  A tentative gesture, however, which was made from a certain quarter to propitiate Lady Ann without relaxing the proprieties, met with such an annihilating rebuff that it would have needed a bolder person than any who lived just then on the banks of the Frome to repeat that offence. The Ashover family was therefore left in peace to work out its own destiny.

  Many other images besides those of the ungracious old lady and the friendly young one rose between Netta and the streaming window panes that November morning.

  Rain more than anything else in the world carries the mind back to early associations, and Netta saw herself as a little girl in a starched pinafore watching it beat on the roof of the Black Dog at Portsmouth.

  She saw herself as an overworked barmaid at the King George in Southampton, watching it turn the little stone gutter into a turbid flood.

  She saw herself as the ambiguously protected “niece” of Major-General Sir James Carton watching it drip‚ drip, drip from a Hammersmith waterspout upon a galvanized-iron roof.

  She saw herself as a second-rate actress in a second-rate stock company watching it from the common dressing room as it changed the colour from yellow ochre to rusty brown of a Bristol alley wall.

  She saw herself in a boat at Abingdon, watching it leap up in a million tiny water tongues from the surface of the great smooth river, the day when a Guy’s Hospital student took her to Pangbourne. She could feel at that very moment the touch of his young feverish hand upon her body. She could hear the harsh-throated sedge warblers chattering in the reeds.