Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  “Dear Lexie!” murmured the girl, trying in vain to get her fingers out of the invalid’s clutch in such a manner as might seem natural and unconscious. “Dear Lexie! Of course you didn’t do anything of the kind! What you said was very sensible; and I daresay quite true. It was because it was so sensible that I laughed. I don’t think sensible things, or even true things, are ever the right explanations when it comes to women!”

  Lexie’s countenance at that moment would have made an engaging study for some master painter; for some portraitist possessed of the psychological impressionism of Spain combined with the grandiose vitality of Venice. The little wrinkles in the skin of his cheeks indicated that his humour was tickled. An unusually concentrated frown in his heavy forehead suggested that his wits were piqued. While the way his drooping half-closed eyelids reduced his eyes—lately so wide open—to nothing but little narrow slits of amorousness denoted that the accidental imprisonment of a hand that desired to escape had already aroused the satyr in his blood.

  “You steered me off just now,” he said, pressing the hand he held against the girl’s slender neck, “when I asked you a definite question. I don’t believe you’re half as much of an idealist as you think you are, you sweet Nell. Why do you keep that hat on? You’re not afraid of sunstroke, are you?”

  As he spoke he used his free hand to pull out the one hatpin that the girl wore; and in a moment her head was bare. He stooped over her as if to follow up his advantage.

  Nell’s own sensations at the moment were terribly complicated. His warm knuckles pressed against her neck sent a faint luxurious relaxation through every nerve of her body. She was so full of shame at her recent lapse from her own ideal that a great weariness possessed her heart, a weariness that could easily have found a numbing relief in letting him do what he liked.

  But simultaneously with these emotions there suddenly rose up within her, to her own surprise, a surging wave of anger against him. What right had he to behave in this way? What right had he to assume that she would let him make love to her? She freed her hand with a jerk and pushed him back so violently and unexpectedly that he staggered.

  “What are you doing, Lexie?” she cried indignantly. “I’ve told you before I don’t like this sort of thing!”

  She didn’t catch the expression upon his face at this rebuff. She only heard him mutter something under his breath as he moved off; and then she saw him go hurriedly to the flower bed under the wall and stoop down. He seemed to be looking for something among the green shoots of the unbudded delphiniums, something that required much fumbling and searching for, if it were to be-found at all.

  His body looked so thin and fragile as he stooped over the bed and his head so heavy, that a twinge of commiseration passed through her.

  “What silly punctilious creatures girls are!” she thought to herself. “Why shouldn’t I have let him kiss me if he wanted to? He’s a much finer, a much more interesting human being than I am; and he’s ill, too! What a brute one is with one’s wretched pride and egotism!”

  Lexie had found what he wanted now and came back smiling, his head held high, his hand extended. It was a single lavender-coloured, double French primrose, enfolded in its own large crumpled leaf.

  “It’s the last left,” he said, handing it to her. “Fast-fading primroses covered up in leaves,” he added, purposely misquoting; “only this isn’t a real primrose. I never have been able to make out what mysterious old associations I have with this flower. It always gives me a peculiar sensation unlike anything else. Don’t you think, my sweet Nell, that there are certain memories in us that come straight down to us from our parents and through them from their parents? If it isn’t like that, what is it? Memories of our childhood before we were conscious?”

  He stopped and they both resumed their seats; he to light a cigarette, she to pin the flower very carefully upon the edge of her dress, against her neck—“exactly,” she thought to herself, “where he touched me just now.”

  “No, no,” he said, “don’t you let that scene with Ann have any effect upon you at all. I give you my word of honour, Nell, that there’s nothing in it—nothing, nothing. She’ll be exactly the same to you when you see her next. Please, don’t let’s have any bourgeois ‘not-speakings,’ and so on, in our circle!”

  “But. Lexie, I can’t go to this picnic after what happened to-day! I can’t face Ann after that! It goes against something in me which doesn’t feel at all ‘bourgeois,’ something that seems just the opposite of ‘bourgeois!’”

  Lexie peered gravely at her through his cigarette smoke. “You’re wrong, Nelly dear. I tell you you’re wrong. It’s the very best thing you could do; for Rook, for yourself, for Lady Ann, for everyone. It is, indeed!”

  The girl bent her head, frowning. She felt an unconscionable longing to see Rook that day. It was a chance she might not have again for many days; and it would be amusing, sitting on the back seat of Mr. Twiney’s gig with Lexie.

  “How is Rook going to get over there himself?” she asked.

  “He? Oh, he’ll walk. Do come, Nell. Do be a spirited, civilized, sensible girl, and come. My mother will think it awfully funny if you don’t. It’s her birthday, you know; and rather an event in our family.”

  The girl looked at him dubiously. “I don’t—feel—as if I could face her and—and talk to her as if nothing had happened. She must think that Rook and I have been seeing each other much more than we have.”

  Lexie got up and threw away his cigarette. It fell close to her feet and she put her foot on its thin wisp of smoke.

  “Think what a meteorite that must seem,” she said, “to the tiny grass-insects. Isn’t it hard to realize, Lexie, how all that we feel is only like a little smoke in the grass?”

  “What’s that?” he rapped out, and moving up to her he took her by the wrists and looked threateningly into her face. “What’s that? What’s that? Like a smoke? Well, and if it is—you dear troubled Nell—that doesn’t make it any the less important.”

  He let her go and remained silent and very grave, looking away from her, away from that sunlit garden, where the early afternoon shadow was just beginning to pass from the gravel path to the box border; away from that piece of dusty white road outside his gate, where that very morning he had picked a bit of yellow stonecrop from the wall and a bit of ground ivy from under the wall, crushing them in his hands and only relinquishing them when Mrs. Bellamy brought him his breakfast, and it came into his mind how perverted, how corrupt, how mad with the worst madness there is in life it was to diminish one jot or one tittle of the unique, the miraculous importance of these heavenly sensations. “Oh, let me live another year—two more years—three more years!” he prayed to that June air and those June odours.

  It was almost as if it came like a sign of acceptance, of recognition, from some hidden heathen deity, still able to exert his power in that Dorset village, that even as the man and the girl looked into each other’s eyes, there sounded from some neighbouring tree invisible to them both the world-old Cuckoo! Cuckoo! of the unconquerable augur of sweet mischief.

  Lexie’s faced relaxed into a smile of thrilling satisfaction; every wrinkle in it deepening and radiating, while he rubbed his hands together. “It hasn’t changed its tune yet!” he cried. “The summer is only beginning.”

  “Very well, Lexie,” said the girl with a deep sigh of submission. “I’ll go with you. I should only be perfectly miserable if I went back now to the house.” She paused, frowning. “I must have just a word with your brother. I couldn’t endure William’s coming back and this whole day being wasted. I don’t hate William as much as I used to, Lexie,” she added inconsequently.

  “No one hates any one when his own life is all right,” he said. “Come on, you sweet Nell, let’s see if Mr. Twiney’s outside. If he isn’t, we might walk as far as that.”

  He moved toward the house. “One moment,” he said. “I’ll just run in and tell Mrs. Bellamy.”

  She w
atched him disappear.

  Over her head flew the long-tailed bird, cuckooing as it flew. Awkward and yet rapid in its direct movement, it seemed to her, just then, as if it were no ordinary feathered creature; but rather a mysterious agent of the gods. She felt a sick repugnance at the thought of encountering Lady Ann again; but her desire to see Rook, to talk to him, to hear his voice, grew every moment more imperative.

  Far away though it was now, she could still hear the voice of the cuckoo; and in some inscrutable manner the sound of it acted as an irritant to hear nerves, making her restless and impatient, making every minute of delay seem fraught with some kind of vague danger to both herself and Rook.

  At the very moment when the young girl was thus concerned about him, Rook himself, having eaten a hurried lunch, was walking quickly across Battlefield.

  Before leaving the house he had opened his iron cash box and placed two five-pound notes in his pocket.

  “I’ll settle that business with Betsy,” he thought, “on my way to High Mead.”

  As he passed the Drools’ cottage he was observed by Binnory, who promptly followed him into the lane and overtook him at a run.

  “Squire Ash’ver!” cried the idiot breathlessly. “Take I with ’ee to see the gippoos! Take I with ’ee to see them two who be half beasties and half men! Take Binnory with ’ee, Squire Ash’ver, and he’ll do summat for ’ee one day! So he will, too, summat ’ee never’d guess at! Take I with ’ee, Squire Ash’ver!”

  Rook turned toward the excited boy with a look of positive hatred. He remembered his behaviour to Lady Ann. He associated him with Corporal Dick.

  “Go home, Binnory!” he rapped out. “Get home with you, child!” And he quickened his pace to shake off this unwelcome attendant.

  He had never been quite satisfied with the accepted version of the lad’s paternity. In his heart he had more than once accused Uncle Dick of being his father; but that was at moments when this whole business of the “Ashover immorality” grew to the dimensions of an obsession.

  They all had the same taint! His father with Nancy Cooper, Corporal Dick with this gamekeeper’s wife, his grandfather with the Corporal’s mother—they had all, in taking their pleasure, become the causes of hideous complications.

  If he had let Netta alone, perhaps by this time she would have married some honest man and been as happy as women are; whereas now—— His thoughts recoiled from the fantastic abominations his imagination called forth.

  “Squire Ash’ver! If I give ’ee them three girt blue her’n’s eggs I’ve a-got hid away, will ’ee take I to see the half beasties?”

  The lad was trotting by his side now, his mouth open, his eyes furtive and foxy. Rook began to lose his temper in earnest. There was something peculiarly irritating to his nerves just then in this encounter. It was bad enough to have to deal with old Betsy and her “partners.” There came over him an unpleasant sense of being surrounded by crowds and crowds of Ashover bastards, each new one more repulsive than the rest. He felt like Macbeth, contemplating the interminable descendants of Banquo.

  “Get away with you, can’t you?” he cried angrily. “What do you mean by following me like this?”

  “Don’t ’ee talk to I like that, Squire Ash’ver,” pleaded the boy, his tone wheedling and coaxing.

  “Go home!” shouted Rook, and began to stride along even more quickly than before.

  But the voice continued at his elbow; for the boy found no difficulty at all in keeping up with him.

  “If you’ll take I to see the half beasties, Squire,” cried Binnory as he ran, “I’ll show ’ee where ’tis said Witch Nancy were bedded when they two was born! ’Tis a dry pond up High Mead way, near-along where you be going to eat and drink present. I’ve a-seed ’un when I were little. ’Twas Granfer Dick showed ’un to I; and he’d a-say how wonderful it were that them things should be born’d, ’long wi’ frogs and toads and hedge-pricklies what have their own lawful nature!”

  Rook stopped and turned round upon the idiot, furious with a blind anger. He raised his stick as if to strike him a blow. Binnory seemed not the least disturbed by this gesture; indeed, he grinned in his face and did nothing but just skip back out of arm’s reach.

  Rook went so far as actually to pursue the boy for a stone’s-throw or two, in the direction of his home; but when he came close up to him a great wave of weariness and disgust fell upon his spirit and made it impossible for him to lift a finger.

  “Go home, I tell you!” was all he could say. But he might have been addressing his words to the elm trees in the hedge for all the effect they had. Whether Binnory had the wit to detect an artificial note in his threats, or whether he trusted in his own obstinate tenacity to get what he wanted in spite of the Squire’s anger, his next move was a masterpiece of strategy.

  He scrambled up the bank and pushed himself through the hedge into the wood. Once in the wood, he waited till Rook turned to go on again; and then proceeded to run parallel with his victim’s advance, keeping the thickset hedge between them.

  Under the smooth branches of the newly leafed beech trees he ran; under the darker foliage of the sycamores; under the stinging twigs of the green hazels; over dog-mercury, over pink campion, over the soft unbudded whitish-green spikes of foxglove and mullein. Feeble-winged currant moths flapped against his face as he ran. Greenish-coloured pollen from the stamens of entangled parasitic plants clung to his cap and to his hair. Swathes of pith twine tripped him up. The oozy stalks of half-dead bluebells bent and broke beneath his boots, staining them, with sticky vegetable juice. Rook heard him groan now and again as the thorns pricked him or the twigs stung his cheeks; but he no longer uttered any words. All his energy seemed taken up in the effort of keeping pace with his unsympathetic companion.

  At last the man could endure the situation no longer. It had begun to touch the limit both of his patience and of his sense of humour.

  “Come here, you rascal!” he shouted. “Come here, Binnory, you rogue! If you can run like that over there, you’d better come back into the lane. I’ll take you with me! You shall see your gippoos!”

  He had hardly finished speaking when, like a rabbit from its burrow, pushing aside the prickly thickness of a holly tree in the hedge, the boy came tumbling and scuffling down the bank.

  Rook moderated his pace after that; and the two curiously assorted companions, having made up their quarrel, proceeded on their way down that sweet-scented lane, amicably discussing the weasels, squirrels, and rabbits that kept crossing their path and the various bird notes that reached them from the wood.

  They came at last to the grassy clearing, where the lane associated with the mysterious name of Gorm branched off from the other; and there, straight in front of them, under the hedge, was Betsy Cooper’s caravan.

  The old woman had erected a clothes-line as a sort of extempore tent; and behind a row of vividly coloured garments hanging between two posts the forms of the unfortunate “partners” were visible, seated opposite each other on the ground, their laps full of moon daisies and quaking grass.

  Rook could see Betsy herself, a few hundred yards or so down the road, digging up dandelion roots with a knife.

  He went straight toward her, leaving his companion to stare at the “half beasties” to his heart’s content.

  “Ay, Squire! So ’ee be come to I, then; so ’ee be come to Auntie Betsy, same as she told ’ee ’ee would. ’Tis good hearing to me wold ears to catch the sound of thee tongue and see thee wicked smiling eyes again! Thou’rt always welcome, Squire Ashover. Thou’rt always welcome.”

  “I’ve brought the money, Betsy,” said Rook quietly, manifesting little tendency to respond to her familiar garrulousness. “And now I hope you’ll keep your promise and move away.”

  He put his hand in his pocket as he spoke and produced the two five-pound notes. The old lady’s countenance assumed a time-battered expression of senile imbecility, out of the depths of which, like the gaze of a snake peering throug
h a sheep’s skull, shone her tiny yellowish eyes.

  “Come to cart, Squire Ashover; come to cart. I’ve got summat to show ’ee afore us puts thik bit of paper across wood and across iron.”

  Rook replaced the notes in his pocket and followed her submissively to her wheeled house. His chief anxiety now was to get his business done before Mr. Twiney’s conveyance, bringing the rest of the party, should appear upon the scene.

  The old woman manifested no surprise at seeing Binnory, who was now seated on the grass at a cautious distance from the dwarfs, regarding their infantile play with a mixture of suspicion and fascination.

  “He be an innocent, same as they be,” she chuckled, glancing furtively at Rook. “Dilly Drool should have come to I for a sip o’ tiger-root when she were heavy. My Nancy never missed a morning without taking of it; and ’twould have given her as healthy a babe as maid could wish; only her old man couldn’t keep his hands off her because of the drink.”

  Rook moved aside to let the woman go up the caravan steps in front of him. She turned her head as she reached the top.

  “Thee Ashovers be sweet-spoken gents and I don’t care who hears me say it; but ye be queer ones with the maids; and ’tis that what brings the thwartings and blightings upon ’ee; for ’tis a sure thing that them as handles ploughs when rye be green and goose-pods be sour finds nothink in meadow when ‘a do come to harvest-time save toadstools and devils-bit!”

  “What do you mean by ‘goose-pods,’ Betsy?” her guest enquired, mounting the steps behind her.

  “I mean them things in pond-water what ain’t water-lilies nor ain’t long purples. But come ’ee in, Squire Ashover, come ’ee in; I’ve a-got summat to show ’ee!”

  The old woman made him sit down on the narrow bed which was covered now by a patchwork quilt. She pulled the white curtains across the window, so that the hot afternoon light that poured into that small interior was softened and mellowed.