Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  Nell’s skirts were stained with beech drippings, with the sticky amber-coloured tar of the spruce firs, with the brown oozings of patches of swamp ground, with the black moisture where accumulations of former rains had saturated the hollow interstices of elm roots and oak roots; with the dust of last year’s funguses. Burr prickles clung to her thin stockings. Her hair, for she had snatched off her hat and carried it now in her hand, was loose and rumpled, and full of bits of twigs and shreds of moss.

  They came to a little open space, covered with thick bentgrass of a vivid emerald green and surrounded by young sycamores. Here they sank down exhausted and silent: Rook with his back against one of the trees, Nell huddled up at his side, her head resting on his lap.

  The physical effort which she had had to make, in forcing her way after him through so many obstacles, had exhausted her to such a point that her nerves were now in complete quiescence. The movement of his fingers as they disentangled the various little objects that had got caught in her hair increased her feeling of profound passivity.

  His own thoughts were perhaps sadder than they had ever been in his life. The very quietness of the moment, the faint innumerable summer sounds that came and went; the rising and falling of a cloud of indolent sunlit gnats, each one of them a little dancing speck of intense consciousness; the sharp reiterated strokes of a woodpecker hidden somewhere above their heads; the swaying of the bent-grass in a wind that was gentler than the breath of sleep: all these things seemed only to enhance and emphasize the lamentable futility of human life, its confusions, its blunderings, its pitiful misunderstandings.

  His heart ached for Netta. If only he knew that she was alive; that she was at least in no desperate straits, in no hopeless misery! But this absolute dead silence lay like a block of heavy quarried stone upon the well mouth of all his natural happiness.

  Nell’s voice broke the silence.

  “It’s lovely here, isn’t it?” she said. “I’m very glad we came here, Rook. I shall never forget this afternoon. It was sweet of Lexie to make me come, wasn’t it? If it hadn’t been for him I never would have thought of it.”

  The man did not answer at once; or rather he answered with a reassuring movement of his hand.

  His actual thought at that moment was rather to be concealed than revealed; for it was one of those thoughts that isolate a person’s identity and put up a sort of invisible screen of malicious loneliness between oneself and one’s companion.

  He indulged in the fantastic wish, in fact, that some sudden electric disturbance, some insane magnetic current, might kill at one blow every kind of “love” toward him in his mother, in his wife, in Nell. He would like to be loved by only two people in the world: by Netta and by his brother!

  “Yes, I am glad Lexie brought you,” he said. “It would have been absurd not to have had you here. Ann is not really as jealous as she likes to pretend. But you know how it is with me these days! I can’t think of anything. I can’t concentrate on anything. I see Netta’s face, I see certain expressions of quaint enjoyment, of funny bewilderment, that she used to have, and it just paralyses me! I’m only half alive all the time. And I hate everyone—well! not quite everyone, Nell—who interrupts my thinking about her! Wouldn’t you suppose, Nell, that it would be possible by sheer willing to force a lost person to reveal his hiding place? It seems so grotesque, so mad, that she should be at this moment somewhere in London wanting to see me; and I should be here wanting to see her; and that we Cannot communicate in any way!”

  Nell rose suddenly to a sitting posture and turned toward him. “Do you know, Rook,” she said, “I sometimes fancy that William knows more about her than he has confessed.”

  “What!”—The word leapt out of Rook’s throat like a bullet from a revolver. “What are you saying?”

  He scrambled to his feet and pulled the girl up with him so violently that his fingers hurt her arm.

  “Dear Rook!” she gasped. “I—don’t—I—I mean—I don’t suppose——”

  The excitement in his face, the return of life to his eyes, the grip of his hand, revealed to her with fatal lucidity how little, in the deepest part of his nature, her own personality and all the romantic happiness that had passed between them really counted.

  “Knows more about her? Hastings knows more about her? What do you mean? Has he said anything to you?”

  “No—no—no—no,” she stammered hurriedly. “It was just a silly thought of mine. It was just that now and then, when I’ve talked to him about Netta, I seemed to feel as if he were uneasy in some way. I hadn’t thought of it seriously till this moment. Oh, Rook, dearest Rook, don’t think too much of so little a thing!”

  “I shall come over to-night and talk to him. Will he be at home? He isn’t away for the night, is he? Let’s get back! My mother will be worried. We mustn’t keep them. We don’t want them to drive off without us.”

  His words came to her ears one after another, like the rattle of musketry, heard from behind the torrent of some tremendous volume of falling water, some splashing Niagara of doom in her own mind. She had not realized till that second of time how far she had gone in her vague irrational hopes about the future, about a future in which he and she were, by some heavenly sorcery, linked together. Consciously it had been to her no more than an enchanted episode, “the perfume and suppliance of a minute”; but in the unconscious recesses of her mind—as happens with most women—she had been spinning, like an insatiable little silkworm, a subterranean cocoon of romantic inventions.

  But it was over now; over for good and all; and she must get back to those self-effacing moods; those moods whose sweetness—though she had not guessed it at the time—must have been craftily nourished by these irrational wellsprings of hope, far, far below the surface.

  She must get back to that feeling she had had, on the day in the Ashover drawing room, when he fell at her knees wounded, distraught, beside himself; and she became for the moment a calm healing spirit, without a single selfish desire of her own.

  “They won’t have gone, will they?” she murmured, as they pushed their way back through the entangling undergrowth by the way they had come.

  “They’ll have waited! They’ll have waited!” he kept saying, as he hurried forward.

  When they came to the place where the ground was swampy and their feet sank into a substance that was brown-black with the dissolution of bark and leaves and grass roots and ancient moss, he put his arm round her waist to lift her faster along.

  It was not till they were close to the hedge dividing the wood from the hayfield that Rook realized, as he released her waist and let her pause to tidy herself up and put on her hat, how white her face had become and how dazed and numb her whole being was. But self-absorbed in the mania of his remorse, it did pierce the armour of his egoism to see the look in her eyes as she stood fumbling with her hair in front of him, her arms raised and her body flecked with the shadows of leaves and branches. He became conscious that she, too, this troubled figure with the sycamore shadows wavering upon her dress, was unhappy in the same sort of way he was unhappy and without his toughness to bear it.

  For a moment they passed out together beyond the circle of both their deep-bitten sorrows; and it was as if what he had felt as he gazed into Betsy’s Cimmery Land crystal rose up again from beneath and beyond them and lifted them into a region outside the sphere of all human confusion.

  “They’ve waited!” he whispered. “I can see Lexie and Mother. It’s all right, Nell dear!”

  She smiled in answer and instinctively held out her hand. He took it and held it for a moment. “You’ve been very good to me, Nell,” he said. “I don’t know what I should do if I hadn’t got you.”

  These last words of his coming after her realization, that afternoon, as never before, of how little, after all, she really meant to him, sounded as hollow to her ears as the mocking rhetoric upon a tombstone.

  She did not speak but dropped his hand as one who had come to the en
d of her endurance and whose only desire was to escape. Breaking away from him she pushed blindly through the hedge and walked across the field without looking back.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  IT WAS just ten o’clock on that same June evening. So late was the sun in sinking and so protracted was the twilight that even now, although the last yellowish-green spaces in the infinite horizon had faded into steely gray, there yet remained a pallid nebulosity in the air, a nebulosity that seemed to emanate from the surface of the earth, as if the earth were its own moon and had the power of holding back both the velvety invasion of darkness itself and the natural luminousness of the high stars.

  Nell had gone to bed by that curious earth light without requiring a candle. She lay now in an exhausted and docile suspension of all her energies; letting the fragrant airs that floated in through the open window stir her hair faintly and lightly upon her forehead and become the accomplices of that abnormal twilight of twilight which made the planetary orb itself resemble a leaf-shadowed glowworm.

  She listened for a while in motionless passivity to the murmur of men’s voices in the study across the passage. She even smiled to herself a little as the fantastic notion crossed her mind that she might be a girl in Damascus or Antioch or Stamboul or in some place where women had nothing of the free initiative such as they possessed on the banks of the Frome.

  With this fancy still in her brain and the large serenity of that June night lulling her senses, she turned over on her side toward the wall. There, in the pallid dimness, she stared passively at a little chance-drawn mark on the gray-plastered surface before her, a quaint little hieroglyph of the fingers of accident, which had come to take many strange shapes and be associated with many strange feelings during her life in that room. Before she slept on this occasion that little scrawl took the shape of Mr. Twiney’s cart; and in the cart, erect and straight, stood the figure of Lady Ann, holding the reins, like a classic charioteer!

  She had a vague feeling that she herself was fleeing from this equipage, fleeing down the glade of a deep, deep wood; and then, all in a moment, like the celestial clouds thrown about their favourites by the Homeric gods, a great friendly mist received her and enveloped her; and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Meanwhile, in the room opposite, a momentous and peculiar dialogue was imprinting itself, like a disordered pattern under the hands of a drink-crazed artist, upon the ethereal stuff of that June night.

  “She gave you no sign, no hint, then—not one of any kind—as to where she was going when she got to London?”

  William Hastings shook his head. Far down in the priest’s subconscious nature there stirred a malicious exultation at the fact that he was holding back Netta’s secret from this rival of his.

  During these last two months, parallel with the cessation of his writing, there had arisen within him a more possessive attitude toward his wife, an attitude that made it harder for him to endure the girl’s attraction to Rook. By one of those inexplicable contrarieties which seem so inevitable an adjunct to all erotic emotions, instead of being tempted to reveal Netta’s address to Rook and thus to side-track him away from Nell, he was fortified and strengthened in what he had come to regard as a sacred contract with the other woman.

  It is likely enough that in any case he would have held fast by his oath to the runaway; but under the present circumstances this oath became more and more of a superstitious trust, a trust into which he flung not only what was obstinate and unyielding in his nature but what was malicious and revengeful.

  His pride had been hurt far more than he himself had realized by his wife’s infatuation. He must have divined, even while still at work on his book, a good deal more of what was going on than he had permitted either Rook or Nell to detect.

  He was a man whose subconscious emotions worked their way to the surface slowly, and, as it were, by a process of infiltration. His first response to his wife’s attraction to Rook had been philosophical and indulgent, just as his first response to Netta’s flight had been a concern for Rook himself; but both these moods were easy and superficial, while all the while there was gradually stirring within him a dark unconscious anger against Rook which only required the impact of some external shock or encounter to bring to head.

  Thus in the matter of Netta’s address his feelings had become extremely complicated. He had begun by keeping her secret out of a vague loyalty to her but he found himself keeping it now out of a definite hostility to Rook.

  “No,” he repeated monotonously to every appeal. “No. She only gave me that letter, which I gave you. Beyond that, you know as much of what happened as I do.”

  “Hastings, you’re not concealing something from me because you think that if I get hold of Netta again it’ll make my wife and my mother miserable, and upset everything? If that’s what’s in your mind I give you my word I won’t bring her back! I’ve no thought of bringing her back, anyhow. It’s the last thing I want to do now. I only want to see her, to know where she is; to get rid of this awful sensation of blankness and emptiness.”

  “So you feel like that, do you?” said William Hastings, pushing the matchbox across the table and lighting a cigarette himself. “I have often wondered, Ashover, whether it was possible for you to feel a thing like this, simply and naturally, as an ordinary man would feel it.”

  “Did she mention,” interjected Rook, “when she was talking to you, any names of her friends?”

  “She spoke of someone called Minnie,” answered the other.

  “That was it! Minnie!” cried Rook eagerly. “Did she mention her surname? Did she mention what theatre she worked in? Did she mention what part of London she lived in?”

  William Hastings drummed with his fingers carelessly on the table. He had given Rook his only easy chair; and he himself sat erect and nonchalant on the chair he used when he wrote.

  “No. She mentioned no surname and no theatre. She talked of Minnie a great deal. She seemed very fond of Minnie. I began quite to visualize this remote young woman; not by her appearance exactly; but by the way Netta made you understand the sort of person she was. I got quite interested in Minnie, Ashover.”

  “You’re sure she hasn’t written to thank you for that money? That’s the thing I cannot understand.”

  Hastings became aware that irony and sarcasm were entirely irrelevant at that moment.

  “No. She hasn’t written to me,” he answered simply. “If she did, of course I would tell you at once. I expect she’s got a place in some theatre. Has it occurred to you, Ashover, to go the round of the London theatres?”

  Rook cast a puzzled, scowling look at his host. He became vaguely conscious that this little stubby dark-eyed man with the Napoleonic paunch was practising some derisive trick upon him.

  “The round of the theatres? Good God, Hastings! what do you mean? Do you mean that I should enquire from every manager in London what people are on his list?”

  The clergyman looked at him now with unmitigated malevolence. “Why don’t you apply to some detective office, Ashover? Those people are trained like dogs for just this kind of thing. They would probably ferret her out in a very short time.”

  “I have thought of that,” replied Rook, crossing his legs and lighting another cigarette. “The objection to my doing it is, I’m afraid, a ridiculously simple one; and you know what that is, Hastings!”

  Hastings lifted his eyebrows and drummed on the table with his plump white hands. “I can guess,” he said.

  “I just haven’t any cash,” went on his visitor. “I mean, nothing approaching enough for a thing like that! And besides—I suppose you’ll think it silly; but I have a sort of horror of using detectives to find Netta.”

  “Perhaps you don’t really want to find her,” said the clergyman.

  Rook looked at him sharply from the depths of his armchair. He began to be much more conscious than he had been at first of the maliciousness in the man’s tone.

  “Why do you say just that, Hasti
ngs?” he asked drily; and if the priest had been more clairvoyant than he was he would have become aware of a sudden veering of the psychological weathercock.

  It had begun to dawn upon Rook that this man was, in some secretive way he could not quite define, playing a game with him.

  “Oh, I don’t mean anything, Ashover. I understand well enough how you shrink from using those people. I only meant that sometimes one is unconscious of the real impulse behind one’s actions.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t give her any more than those fifteen pounds?”

  As he spoke Rook looked at the pale, plump face above him with its heavy-lidded greenish-black eyes and became conscious of the fact that he had no more notion of what went on in this extraordinary person’s mind than he had of what went on in the mind of some great toad hidden under a rhubarb leaf in Nell’s little garden.

  Rook had insisted upon returning to Hastings that particular sum; and the clergyman, unwilling to make an issue out of a point of that kind, had accepted the money in the spirit in which it was given.

  “Not a penny more,” repeated the man at the table, resting his chin upon his hands and staring at the oblong frame of grayness through which the scented night air came floating into the little room.

  Rook uncrossed his legs and clutched the arms of his chair with angry, bony fingers. He scowled helplessly at the impassive countenance above him. There was something in the immense silence of that slowly descending etherealized darkness that seemed to render it a kind of brute stupidity in him not to be able to read his companion’s thoughts. That impalpable summer air was like a condensation of the thoughts of the terrestrial globe itself, strange, dreamlike, non-human, such as rose and fell, fell and rose, with the rhythm of some vast, placid, elemental sea.

  Rook longed to tell the man that it was Nell herself who had suggested that he knew more of Netta’s plans than he had confessed; but even in his present harassed impatience he had not quite the cold-blooded cynicism to drag the young girl into their colloquy.