Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  And in the gray hollowness of that crystal, which he now saw as the very rondure of eternity, he was obscurely conscious of a projection of himself, of William Hastings; not the William Hastings who was on the verge of discovering the secret of universal death; but a William Hastings who was a little unhappy boy at school, persecuted by his companions and hating all the world, but able to think the whole world away and to sink back, back, far back, into the comfortable arms of the infinite Nothingness!

  His last thought, before his pipe fell from his mouth and his head sank back in sleep, was that of the two creatures behind the Paisley shawl. He fancied he saw them emerge from their retreat. He fancied he saw them take each other’s hands and dance a strange and monstrous dance, the dance of the Annihilation of All Life; the dance of That which was destined to take the place of Life; when the Caravan of the Universe touched at last the circumference of its voyage!

  CHAPTER XV

  THE day that broke over the five human heads—if Betsy Cooper’s “partners” could be called human—domiciled in that fantastic shelter was one of those exceptional spring days that seem created by Nature to protect herself against the too exquisite intensity of her own birth pangs.

  It was as if a tenuous film, composed of some aërial stuff more delicate than vapour or cloud, had been drawn like a floating veil between earth and sky.

  Every palpable object by roadside or meadow seemed to emerge from a soft enveloping mist that was neither white nor yellow nor purple but resembled rather that mother-of-pearl opalescence which shimmers in the hollowness of certain seashells.

  The mental atmosphere in the caravan was, however, as so often happens with our persecuted humanity, in direct and discordant opposition to the tender vaporousness of the relaxed weather outside.

  It was an atmosphere of cold and obstinate resolution; disenchanted, joyless, weary, but rigid in its purposes, and defiant of all opposition.

  The mood that dominated that small group as they talked over their bread and tea was the mood of Netta Page. So hopeless in its inflexible determination was this mood that it seemed to obsess and preoccupy the girl herself to the complete exclusion of her other normal faculties.

  She manifested no more than the very faintest shrinking when, in the process of satisfying the needs of the deformed twins, the Paisley curtain was dragged completely aside.

  What she had decided upon was to take the midday train to London and just lose herself in the unsearchable depths of that great sea of tossing humanity.

  Contrary to Cousin Ann’s opinion, she had taken no more money when she left Ashover than the coins in her purse; and the appeal she now made to Hastings was that he should purchase her railway ticket for her before they separated.

  Hastings refused for a long time even to consider such a thing. What he felt was that whatever may have been the reasons for her unaccountable flight it was incumbent upon him to plead for second thoughts; incumbent upon him to prevent any irrevocable step till Rook had seen her again. He was anxious to hire a conveyance and just take her back to the village, leaving it to herself and Ashover to settle their difficulties when they met. If he had had the least inkling of the fatal visit to Tollminster, it might have given him a clue as to how to act, but the situation being so dark and obscure, all he could think of was just to retard the rush of events.

  It was unfortunately true, and he had had to confess this to the obstinate girl, that the bank he dealt with happened to be in Bishop’s Forley, so that if he once agreed to lend her this money all they had to do was to wait till the hour for the building to open. She dragged this out of him by wild talk about pawning her cloak and rings, but he cursed himself for his candour when he found how ardently she jumped at it.

  Old Betsy Cooper listened with intense interest to all this talk and hurried off with alacrity to find pencil and paper, when, the discussion concluded at last and Hastings conquered, Netta insisted upon writing a letter for him to take to Rook.

  Had the clergyman been more of a man of the world, had he been less hopeless and disenchanted himself, he might have held out against her entreaties. But what could he do? He couldn’t put her by force into a cart bound for Ashover; and to leave her to trail round in desperation through the pawn-shops of this forlorn town seemed more heartless than to accede to her wishes.

  A vague idea did for a moment cross his mind that he might leave her imprisoned in Betsy Cooper’s care while he hurried back himself to Ashover; but even so abstracted a disciple of Paracelsus was too well acquainted with the tenacity of women when under the power of a fixed idea to give more than the attention of a second to such a scheme.

  Another line of action that flashed through his mind was to send the old woman off to despatch a messenger or a message to Rook, while he himself held Netta by force just where she was. But Netta’s impatience, shut up with him there alone for half a day, in close propinquity to those Deformities, was more than he found himself prepared to face. Had she been a younger girl or a weaker girl, the thing would have been easier. He could have dominated her then by sheer official authority. But how could he dominate a self-possessed, reserved woman, her own mistress, knowing exactly what she wanted, and knowing exactly what she wanted of him?

  The end of it was that with Netta’s letter to Rook in his pocket and with all the money he had had on him transferred to Betsy’s pocket, he started off with the girl through that vaporous spring haze on their way to Stockit’s Dorset Bank.

  He found no difficulty in drawing out the money from his small savings. The difficulty came when it was a question of giving her something beyond the actual price of the ticket so that she should not find herself penniless when she reached London.

  Another woman perhaps would have been unpersuadable over this, too, but as long as the money she made use of was not Rook’s money Netta’s scruples were feeble and easily over-ridden. He had the satisfaction of knowing, before they separated, that what she finally accepted was enough to keep her alive for at least a month after she reached town, and even longer than that if she were very careful. But if she yielded on this point and seemed quite vague and uncertain as to whether the money were a loan or a gift, she became as rigid as adamant when Hastings asked for some address.

  “London is enough address for any one,” she said, with that peculiar society tone that Hastings found so difficult to put up with. “You’ll hear of me, if I become a celebrated actress,” she added more naturally.

  Hastings had taken for granted that since he had made it possible for her to escape he was in a position to demand her address, and this point-blank refusal outraged his sense of justice. When he understood that she really intended to remain obdurate, he began to regret that he had not made this stipulation earlier, made it before the means to exact it had passed from his hands.

  It was eleven o’clock when this conversation took place, and the London express left at noon. The girl entreated him to say good-bye to her before she actually went to the station. She was nervous, she said, lest someone should recognize him, even if she herself passed unnoticed.

  Her umbrella was rolled up neatly now and her black bag looked eminently respectable. No one would have recognized in this quiet dignified woman the forlorn creature of last night’s encounter.

  They went together into a little dairy shop and had a luncheon of cocoa and halfpenny buns on a marble counter. It was then that, in a final attempt to change her resolution, he began to emphasize the unfairness of the course she was taking and its cruelty to Rook. The girl’s reply to this was to break, without a moment’s warning, into a passion of silent weeping. Her big tears, for it was a peculiarity of Netta’s to shed very large tears when she wept, came literally splashing down upon the marble table and reduced all his arguments to silence. Even at this juncture, however, he was struck by the manner in which women can give way to mental anguish and yet retain their consciousness of practical exigencies. For even in the midst of her tears he saw her glance at th
e clock and begin feeling in her purse to make sure she had not mislaid the money he had given her.

  It came over him like a sudden illumination, the tenacious power of life in human beings, this mysterious life, against which he was waging his insane metaphysical war!

  For Netta pulled out of her pocket one of those tiny handkerchiefs, compressed into the shape of a small puff-ball by being clutched in the palm of a feverish hand, such as all the lovers and all the sons of women see so often without seeing, as if they were the handles of doors or the knobs of bedposts, and after rubbing her cheeks and adjusting her hair looked straight into his face with a spontaneous smile.

  That smile, more pitiful and more heroic than anything Hastings was destined to witness for many a long day, returned to his mind more than once in the course of the next twenty-four hours. It followed him back to his cottage by the water meadows. It followed him to his supper table. It followed him to his bed. And when he was next seated at his desk, reassembling the dark threads of his devastating philosophy, it troubled his sentences and ruffled his thought in the same way that the discovery of a gleaming bracelet in an ash pit would disturb the occupation of a gatherer-up of cinders.

  Though there was so little of a link between them, the mere sense of the fatality and finality of the step she was taking made it difficult for both of them to bring themselves to the irrevocable moment of saying good-bye. He walked with her lingeringly down the narrow street, with its rows of little greengrocers’ and confectioners’ shops, faintly hoping as they went along that even yet, at the last, she might draw back from her desperate plunge.

  They passed a vulgar modern hostelry entitled the Antiger Arms just before they reached the final turn to the station; and quite casually and with that peculiar kind of dull, sick, superficial curiosity, such as must often be the mood of condemned criminals as they are led to execution, the girl glanced into the little carriage yard of this place.

  Her fingers clutched her companion’s wrist.

  “There’s Mr. Twiney!” she whispered.

  Hastings did not need to be told. With a rush of fierce relief, which showed how far below his misanthropic indifference his uneasiness at Netta’s departure had gone, he recognized the familiar figure of the most affable of his parishioners.

  Netta made now an instinctive movement to escape; but the priest held her arm tightly and pulled her into the yard after him, past the painted shafts and the muddy splash-boards of a long line of farmers’ gigs, till he had attracted Mr. Twiney’s attention.

  “Mr. Hastings! Lord ’a’ mercy on us! And Miss Page! Well, I’ll be blotted out of Book! Ay, won’t Squire be glorified to see ’ee! A’ve been raging and carrying on like a ferret in a poke. It’s been hither and thither with him and no mistake; no rest, no sleep you might say, since he drove wi’ I to get tied up to’s cousin. Ye’ve a-heard of that goings-on, I reckon? ’Tis all over Dorset. Tied up and married he be, safe and sound; but a’s had no pleasure in’t so far; only hither and thither, as a person might say. But a’ll be a man again now, belike, the poor gentleman, now you’ve a-found this lady, Mister Hastings!”

  The clergyman looked at Netta to see if she had caught the drift as unmistakably as he had done himself of Mr. Twiney’s words.

  Her head was rigid on her neck, but tilted a little to one side, like a flower-pot on the top of a dahlia stick.

  “Mr. Ashover and Lady Ann are married, you say?” She repeated the words as if they were an echo of something else, of some other, quite different words that were resounding in her own ears.

  Mr. Twiney looked at them now with an expression of grave concern upon his countenance. It came over him that he had “let his tongue hang out” as his wife Eliza was wont to express it.

  “That be just how it be, miss,” he answered solemnly. “But don’t ’ee take on because of that, lady,” he added anxiously. “Gents like our Squire do marry or not marry same as the likes of I do throw peelings to pigs. ’Tis a small matter to they, lady. Why, ’tis nothink at all! They sleeps the same; and they eats the same. ’Tis a kind of whimsy with they, and I’m blind sure Squire’ll be as joyed to see ’ee as if he ain’t never set eyes on that grand young woman what is now his lawful missus!”

  Hastings slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket and glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve. In fifteen minutes the express would come in. In twenty minutes it would have come and gone.

  He found himself looking nervously at the entrance to the yard. At any moment, he thought, Rook might appear on the scene and settle everything!

  Netta might have easily noticed both these significant movements on the part of her indiscreet protector; but at the close of Mr. Twiney’s speech she had produced a lead pencil and a bit of paper—legacies, both of them, from their night with Betsy—and had begun writing hurriedly and quickly. She held up the paper now toward William Hastings.

  “That’ll find me in London,” she said. “But you must swear to me, by God’s truth, that you won’t show it to Mr. Ashover. Do you swear that?”

  Confused and bewildered by the rapidity of her movement, and only anxious to retain her with him till the train had gone, Hastings gave her his promise.

  “I shall Want to know how he gets on,” she murmured hurriedly, repossessing herself of her black bag which he had placed on the ground. And then with her hand on his arm: “But you swear you won’t even tell him you’ve got an address? If you do, if you give him the least hint, remember you’ve broken your word!”

  She need not have pressed her point so desperately. In the earlier hours of their contact the priest’s consideration had been mostly for Rook, who, after all, was his patron if not his friend. But, as so often happens in these cases, when one enters an emotional imbroglio from one particular entrance it is likely enough that one comes out of it on quite the opposite side. Hastings had been swept so far into the tide of Netta’s feelings that it was impossible for him to remain the neutral spectator he had been at the beginning. The mere fact that she had taken him into her confidence as she had done drew him to her side and compelled him to divide his loyalty.

  As he took from her this little bit of paper he saw a look on her face which made him realize her identity as he had never done in the days at Ashover; realise it in the way human beings so seldom do realize these mysteries as they pass and repass in the casual encounters of life.

  At the very moment, however, when this new perception broke the hard crust of the clergyman’s sensibility, Mr. Twiney, who had been staring at the entrance to the yard, suddenly called out in stentorian tones: “There he do go! There he do go!”

  Hastings looked up and saw the figure of the Squire of Ashover on the farther side of the road, running as fast as his legs could carry him in the direction opposite from that of the railway. Rook had made a point of being on the platform to see that particular express go; but a policeman in the station, of whom he asked the eternal question he had been asking all day and night, had reported that he had just seen a woman, exactly corresponding to the description given, eating with someone in a little dairy shop in the town. “But whether she’s still there, Mr. Ashover, I can’t inform you, sir.”

  If Mr. Hastings had been more of a strategist and less of a philosopher he would have clung to Netta at this crisis and made Mr. Twiney pursue his master. Instead of doing this he completely lost his head, bolted out of the yard into the road, and ran up the street after him, shouting: “Mr. Ashover! Mr. Ashover!” at the top of his voice.

  A great brewery van nearly rolled over him as he tried to cross, and he had to draw back from under the very horses’ heads; and when he did get over, Rook was already some twenty yards away, running at a great rate, entirely oblivious of the fact that any one was following.

  The policeman’s words had filled the unfortunate man with that sickening desperate hope that trembles, by its own extravagant impetus, on the verge of certainty. As he ran, he already saw Netta in the small shop; saw himse
lf rushing in upon her there; saw himself hugging her savagely to his heart; saw the illuminated look with which she would greet him; felt a flood of sobbing, ecstatic relief, as if a dead body, loved beyond everything in the world, had been restored to life.

  It came over him with a blinding rush of tragic certainty that if he let Netta slip out of his hands now at this moment she would disappear completely into the void. To find her, to speak to her, to hold her now was his one chance!

  He was actually within a few paces of the very place where the girl and Hastings had had their hurried meal when the latter overtook him.

  The priest was too breathless to do more for a moment than stand gasping. As he struggled to speak he could hear in the distance the unmistakable thunderous sound of the Great Western express rolling into the station.

  “She’s there!” he gasped. “Rook, she’s there! She’s got her ticket for London!”

  The unhappy victim of the hunting dogs of remorse did not delay a minute. Like a leaf in the wind he turned his face; and breathing hard as an animal that reverses his track, he rushed off the way he had come, scattering the astonished pedestrians and making the drivers of market carts and trade wagons turn round to stare at him.

  It had not been wasted, even on the indurated skull and irresponsive nerves of Mr. Twiney, that as the man ran so desperately north-northeast, the woman hurried with equal precipitation south-southwest.

  He returned to the stable, and in order to be what the poet calls utrumque paratus (prepared for either event), he began harnessing his long-necked mare, expressing, as he did so, his own commentary upon these events into her cavernous ear.

  “He’ve a-run from train and she’ve a-run to train! That’s how things do go, Liza, me beauty. ’Tis a pity for man and beast, me lass, that ’tis so, but so ’tis and us has best reckon on’t. He that way, she this way! ’Tis only to be trusted, me little hoss, that since World be round and Christmas be coming, this poor sorrowing gent and his sweetheart’ll cuddle down yet, comfortable and sly, spite of all accidents.”