Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  Then she placed a wooden table in front of him and on the table a curiously woven very old mat, of an unusual and enigmatical pattern.

  Rook wondered vaguely what the preparations meant; but his thoughts wandered off to his fixed idea of his bad treatment of Netta and they only returned to his present surroundings when the sound of the steady trotting of Mr. Twiney’s mare broke upon that summer stillness.

  He listened intently, his face toward the door; but the dogcart passed by without stopping, its occupants apparently undisturbed by the sight of the dwarfs and Binnory.

  Betsy Cooper gave no sign that she had even heard the quick trotting of the mare, as Lady Ann speeded it up with rein and whip. What she did now was to place upon the table a perfectly round clear crystal, about the size of a large apple, and so smooth and globular that it was only by putting it down with the utmost gentleness that she rendered it immobile.

  “What’s that?” said Rook. “Can you see fortunes in it, Betsy?”

  “Fortunes!” snorted the crone contemptuously. “You can see the Will of God in it, Squire Ashover!”

  The man bent down over this microcosmic symbol of the world he found so hard to handle, and stared fixedly and rigidly into its irised depths. Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red—they were all held in faint solution in the rondure of that prismatic orb.

  Betsy stood in front of him, waiting patiently. She did not ask him “if he saw anything.” She leaned her hands upon the table and half-closing her eyes swayed a little, backward and forward, humming some obscure gibberish underneath her breath.

  Then Rook did actually begin to see something. Whether it was a phantom of the mind, “a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain,” or whether a flawless crystal of that particular kind has the power—as yet unverified by science—of reflecting thoughts as well as objects, the fact remains that he saw the figure of Netta bending over something.

  What was it she was bending over? Her head was lowered so that he could not catch the expression on her face; but the feeling he got from what he did see of her was sad without being hopelessly unhappy. It was calm and quiet.

  “What is she looking at?” he muttered aloud.

  The old woman above him took no notice of his words; but her hummings and mumblings increased in volubility. Then he became aware of what it was that this image of his ill-used mistress gazed at so calmly. It was himself—the form of Rook Ashover—and it lay hushed and white and still in a coffin of dark-coloured wood.

  For a seconder two longer he looked at this picture in the crystal; and as he looked a great wave of unalterable peace and happiness passed over him.

  So deep and convincing was this sensation that when the figures finally faded away and he lifted up his head he experienced that sense of irrational fretfulness and irritation such as people feel when they are awakened suddenly out of a restorative and dreamless sleep.

  He poshed the table away and stretched himself. His very muscles felt as if he had just been aroused from a prolonged slumber. He yawned and scowled crossly; stretched out his arms again and muttered: “Ay! ay!” in an intonation of petulant querulousness.

  Betsy Cooper took not the least notice of what he was doing. She removed the mat. She took down an old clay pipe from a bracket nailed to the wall and filling it with tobacco sat down upon a chair to smoke. A thin sun-moted stream of light that had found an entrance between curtain and window frame turned her mummy-like face into gleaming gold and the smoke of her pipe into pontifical incense.

  Rook rose to his feet and stood over her. He felt drugged and stupid and absurdly childish.

  “Where did you get that thing from?” he asked, in a fussy, matter-of-fact, disparaging tone.

  Betsy took the pipe from her mouth and stared at him with the slow, patient, satiric stare of thousands of years of sunburned, rain-bleached wisdom.

  “’Tis the Cimmery stone,” she murmured.

  He began walking up and down that small interior like a wild animal in the presence of his tamer.

  “What Cimmery stone?” he demanded abruptly, standing in front of her again.

  “From Cimmery Land, Squire,” she answered quietly. “And that be the land where folks do live like unborn babes. They don’t see nothink, nor hear nothink, in thik place, except what be like the smoke of this ’ere pipe; and when them folks do talk ’mid theyselves it be like the turning of Miller Cory’s girt wheel—mum, mum, mum—where us can hear the drumming of wonderful green water and where millstone be all moss-mumbled and wheel be all hart’s-tongue ferns! ’Tis real wet rain, what’s finer than corpse dust, them folks do live under; and they tell I it be wonderful strange to see ’un walk and talk … mum … mum … mum … and thik mist all slivery and dimsy round ’un.”

  As the old woman spoke Rook became quieter and his nerves less irritable. He could not catch the full import of what she said, but it soothed and calmed him. It was as though she were describing to him the god-like dwellers in some unearthly Limbo—some Elysian Fourth Dimension—out of Space and out of Time—where everything was, as it were, painted with gray upon gray; and where large and liberating thoughts moved to and fro over cool, wet grass like enormous swallows, easily, naturally, without any effort; thoughts that were made of memories and of hopes, and never of logic or of reason; thoughts that came and went under a thin, fine, incessant rain that itself was composed of the essence of memory, the memory of old defeated, long-forgotten gods whose only immortality was in this gray, cool, silent, sadly driven mist!

  As he listened to the old woman and watched the smoke of her pipe floating up into the illuminated sun-ray where it broke at once into a hundred silver-blue undulations, it came over him that this Cimmery Land of which she spoke was the thing that he had so often vaguely dreamed of; dreamed of on lonely roads at twilight; dreamed of lying on his bed listening to the sounds of the morning; dreamed of under walls of old buildings in the quiet places of historic cities, when the noons fell hotly and the shadows fell darkly, and from hidden fountains came the splash of water.

  Dreamed of! But never, until this moment, felt within his conscious brain, as something that out of the turbulent arena of life might actually emerge—emerge and establish itself—as this crystal had done, projected like a Bubble of Eternity from some great under-tide, beyond the reach of loss and longing and lust and loathing, beyond the reach of everything for which humanity has found a name.

  His reverie was interrupted by strange sounds from the grass plot outside.

  “Thik innocent be pestering me partners,” said the old woman, rising stiffly to her feet. “Best gie I them bank-notes afore ye leaves,” she added, screwing up her eyes and swallowing her thin lips till her face resembled a Chinese idol.

  Rook put his hand in his pocket and drew out the two notes. The old woman took a bit of wood out of the unlit stove and a plain steel knife out of a drawer. She laid both these things on the table where the crystal had been, the former on the top of the latter. Taking the notes in her hand, she spat three times on them and spread them out upon the wood-and-iron cross which she had thus constructed.

  “I’ll be off from troubling of thee any further, Squire Ashover,” she said. “And if I bain’t much mistaken thee and me will follow different ways here-to-come.”

  By the time Rook arrived at Antiger High Mead his mother’s birthday picnic was in full swing.

  The late afternoon sun cast long richly coloured shadows across that small hayfield. The haymakers had left their work to go to their tea and their half-filled wagon was standing under a large pale-leafed ash, its glossy chestnut-coloured horse, monumental as a statue in classic bronze, patiently munching a great heap of fragrant grass.

  The three women were sitting with their backs to him so that Lexie, drinking his tea with epicurean satisfaction, his eyes missing nothing of the magic of that June day, was the first to see him approaching.

  He came round from the western side of the field,
so that his shadow, advancing before him, fell across the whole party and extended to the wheels of the wagon under the ash tree.

  “There you are!” he cried in a half-jocose, half-reproachful voice, a voice that carried the nuance that they might have waited for him before actually beginning their repast.

  “You’re late, Rook,” said his mother, turning her head and making room for him at her side.

  “How is it we didn’t pass you?” enquired Lady Ann. “Is there any other way? I thought you had to come by the road.”

  “So sorry I couldn’t manage that lunch with you, Nell,” he said, taking no notice of the questions asked him and putting out his hand for a cup of tea. “Ann has explained how it happened, I expect? She’d got farther afield than she ought and I had to take her home.”

  “Oh, Nell perfectly understands!” cried Lady Ann, selecting a water-cress sandwich from the basket beside her. “Your apologies are so belated, my dear, that they’re really unnecessary. Aren’t they, Nell? It’s just like Rook, isn’t it, to be so formal in his explanations? You might think that we were all strangers, instead of—what we are!”

  Her rich flute-like laugh rang across the hayfield and, her gray eyes, full of voluptuous malice, played mischievously over both her victims.

  “I think it’s quite right for Rook to apologize,” said Mrs. Ashover. “I’m sure that’s the kind of thing I brought you up to do, isn’t it, Rook?” The little old lady surveyed her eldest son with ironic complacency.

  “You brought us up to nothing of the sort, Mother,” remarked Lexie, holding out his cup to be refilled by Lady Ann and laying it carefully down by his side as he prepared to light a cigarette. “You put into our heads such an idea of the greatness of the family that every single thing we did was done as if an Ashover couldn’t do wrong.”

  “I’m sure Mrs. Ashover never taught you anything of the sort,” threw in Nell gently, smiling at Lexie with a clinging, lingering smile on her unclassical mouth, while every nerve in her body responded tremulously to Rook’s closeness to her. “I’m sure the outside world regards you all as possessed of beautiful manners. Don’t you think so, Lady Ann?”

  “Is that a subtle suggestion that however much I may marry an Ashover I must always remain an outsider?” retorted the daughter of the diplomatist.

  Nell blushed. This kind of equivocal badinage was always embarrassing to her; and she felt vaguely that Cousin Ann was in some indirect way trying to make a fool of her.

  Rook, who had been drinking tea and eating bread and butter like a man in a trance, now put down his empty cup, glanced whimsically at his wife, and holding out his hand to Nell to help her to get up, said quietly and naturally: “Come for a stroll with me, Nell, then, will you? And we’ll make up for our lost lunch by finding a wood-warbler’s nest. There used to be a lot of birds in these woods. Do you remember the black-cap’s eggs, Lexie? How we left two in the nest; and I broke all we took; and then got angry when you wanted to go back for one of the two we’d left?”

  While he threw out these casual remarks to cover their retreat, Nell was struggling to regain her composure; struggling to get strength of mind enough to look Lady Ann in the face. The temptation to obey him and follow him was more than she could resist; but she knew well that his naïve masculine assumption that he was carrying off the situation by his flippant tone was entirely unjustified.

  To Nell’s consternation Lady Ann herself at that moment scrambled up from the grass. “Black-caps!” she cried. “Oh, Rook, I’d no idea you had black-caps so near Ashover! We used to have to go so far out into the woods to see one; and then you generally heard it without seeing it!”

  Rook’s mind at that moment sank down into a veritable gulf of misery. He saw himself for the rest of his life having to deal with this strong, capable, high-spirited woman, for whose personality at that moment, although she was the mother of his child, he felt not one single shred of love, but rather something that bordered very closely upon sheer hatred.

  This occasion would probably be repeated again and again and again—the same difficulty in getting away; the same inevitable dissimulation; the same teasing contest. And yet he ought to have been gratified and thrilled at having the love of a girl as beautiful and distinguished as Ann Gore.

  The truth was, he thought, as he let his brother Lexie take up his wife’s challenge and talk about black-caps, the truth was that men didn’t want the love of women, unless under circumstances that gratify a certain subtle craving in their life illusion, a certain subconscious self-love, which is deeper than any pride, or any vanity, or any conceit, or any lust! They want to love women themselves, in every possible kind of way, wickedly, tenderly, chastely, licentiously; but when it comes to a matter of being loved, they become harshly exacting and suffer from every sort of antipathy and repulsion unless in the one single case where their life illusion is satisfied.

  The most immoral of men are monogamists in this sense. They are perfectly prepared to exploit the love that women give them and turn it to their own profligate account; but it rarely occurs to them that such love is in itself a rare and exquisite commodity. It presents itself rather as a tragic and burdensome appendage to a lovely and magical experience. It only becomes precious, as a thing in itself, when it answers the hunger of this mysterious life illusion which is deeper than possessiveness and stronger than sensuality.

  Women, on the contrary, so Rook’s troubled thoughts ran, regard their own “love” as so rare and so precious, that it fills them with a sense of intolerable grievance when the man they care for slights it or undervalues it. They are ready then to accuse such a man of every sort of meanness and baseness. With malicious inspiration they label him with just the particular faults that are most hateful to him, associating their indignation against him with everything in the world except the one thing for which he is really to be blamed; the fact, namely, that he was betrayed into speaking their language when he was using them in his fashion.

  He remembered vividly the latter taunts that his wife had levelled at him as they lingered together in the hall before he started. They were all unfair, unjust; beside the mark. And yet they hurt him just because they touched him where he was most sensitive.

  She had accused him of having concealed from her what she called his “love affair with a little chit of a married schoolgirl.” And as they watched his mother coming down the Jacobean staircase she had flung at him the taunt which she divined would pierce him the deepest.

  “It’s her blood in you, you know! That Gresham blood!”

  While these thoughts passed through Rook’s mind his eyes were fixed upon the corner of the hayfield where Mr. Twiney’s horse had been tethered. They had taken him out of the shafts and he was nibbling now at the new honeysuckle shoots in the leafy hedge.

  Great bushes of elder, crowded with flowery “patens” of ivory whiteness, stretched their branches down to the level of the cut grass; and the look of these heavy blossoms against the close-shaven ground gave to Rook a sharp sensation of some old childish memory that made his present sadness all the deeper.

  The badinage that had been passing like an invisible shuttle-cock among that group of people subsided at last. “Don’t break the black-cap’s eggs this time,” cried Lady Ann after them as Rook moved away with Nell toward the edge of the wood.

  They were still within sight of the others and were examining the tiny crimson petals of the first wild rose they had yet seen really in bud when the girl murmured anxiously in his ear: “We must never do it again, Rook. We must be very, very good from now on! Your wife is very angry with me. She despises and hates me, and I can’t stand it. Oh, Rook, how cruel it is for everything to be like that. when it’s all so beautiful!”

  He looked at her face vacantly as it was lifted up to him from under her broad-brimmed hat. Her mouth was twitching. Her eyes gazed at him through so much water of unfallen tears that he began absentmindedly to speculate—as if in the presence of a scientific proble
m—how it could be possible that they could remain as they were without brimming over and running down her cheeks.

  “Come on,” he said abruptly. “Let’s get out of sight.”

  They moved forward a few yards, skirting the hedge. Nell trailed her fingers through some tall umbelliferous flowers that grew amid the uncut feathery grasses. She hung her head and her heart felt weary within her. Was he in a mood to disregard all she’d been saying—all she had been vowing to herself of renunciation and effacement? Was he going to take her into all that lovely freshly budded greenery, into all that mass of leaves and undergrowth, of ferns and moss and entangled branches, and just seize upon her without further scruple?

  Her heart began to beat violently. A vibrant tremor of magnetic excitement rose from the very centre of her soul and, like a mounting stream of quicksilver, quivered through the nerves of her body. By anticipating his unscrupulousness, his reckless indifference to consequences, as something already present before her, she was conscious of a sudden responsive thrill of complete abandonment.

  They came to a gap in the hedge. Her heart beat so wildly that she was afraid the man must hear it. Where had fled all her self-sacrificing vows, all her resolutions of effacement? Glancing round at the others before she let him pull her up to his side on the hedge bank, she saw Lady Ann had gone over to the place where she had tied the horse and was re-adjusting the bridle so as to give the animal more scope to feed. There was something in this simple and natural proceeding that struck the girl’s mind with a sense of shame. She saw Mrs. Ashover, too, talking so quietly and happily with Lexie—both of them with their backs propped up against haycocks—that she felt as if there were something discordant, ill-considered, irrelevant in this ill-timed love of hers for this husband, this son, this brother, whose days might have stretched out so calmly before him in these pleasant places.

  Rook helped her through the hedge, however, and led her straight into the wood. Above their heads the indefatigable little chiff-chaff repeated his two-syllabled monotone. From far up the woody slope, where the trees were taller and the undergrowth thinner, there sounded the Caw—Caw—Caw of the man’s own ragged-winged namesakes.