Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  And this was a trick that had been played upon him by a subtle conspiracy of all the persons in his entourage. His mother and Lady Ann had plotted for it. Netta had sacrificed herself for it. Nell had accepted it and condoned it. And most of all, that indestructible and accursed entity, the House of Ashover itself, had pushed him into it with urgent, unwearied, importunate hands, all the more powerful because they were invisible!

  His mind began running up and down the events of his life. He had drifted into this cul-de-sac in a sort of anæsthetized trance. Something vety deep in his nature had always preserved an absurd faith in his power of extricating himself from any trap. This faith no doubt depended on his emotional detachment; on those remote translunar journeys of his mind that seemed to reduce all human relations into a misty puppet show, seen through the smaller end of a telescope!

  He cast about in his brain until his mind trailed its wings and sank huddled and drooping from sheer exhaustion in the attempt to find some outlet from his dilemma.

  To and fro those orange-bodied dragon-flies darted. To and fro across the oozing footprints of the cattle, between great heaps of dung, clouds of infinitesimal midgets hovered and wavered; while in a corner of clear water a group of tiny black water beetles whirled round and round, as if they were trying to outpace their own small shadows which answered to their movement, down there on the sunlit mud, in queer radiated circles like little dark-rimmed moons.

  The peculiar nature of Rook’s intelligence did not permit him the pragmatic refuge of some drastic change in his system of life. His soul wilted and sagged but he felt no energy to cry: “Hold … enough!” to the cohorts of chance; or to deify them with ethical nicknames.

  That the universe could be envisaged as a place where human characters were hammered and chiselled into some premeditated mould of valour or resignation never so much as crossed the threshold of his consciousness. His vision of things would go on to the very end drawing its quality from just such vignettes of the ways of nature as he was staring at at that moment—those casual heaps of cattle dung, those dancing midges, that green pond slime, those revolving jet-bright beetles!

  He was sick and weary with the effort of thinking; of thinking round, and round in the same circle. He was like a hunted gladiator who, in his blind race for life, keeps seeing the same impassive faces looking down upon the same heart-breaking circuit of the arena.

  At that particular moment it began to dawn upon him that this numb, paralyzed, gray, horizonless state was worse, in the kind of misery it produced, than his furious self-accusations about Netta.

  It was not the Netta trouble that was hurting him the deepest now, it was his reaction to his marriage; a reaction that seemed to menace the very essence of his identity, an essence that had winced and squirmed under the whip of his remorse but after all had been there, intact and integral in the darkness; there for good or for evil!

  But his marriage seemed in some mysterious way to invade this precious untouchable essence, to swamp it, to blur it, to destroy its outlines. The truth was that the peculiar “formula” or illusory “symbol” of his especial kind of sensuality had always implied a very definite relation between himself and the object of its attraction, a relation according to which it was necessary for him to feel himself entirely independent and detached from the other person; necessary, in fact, that he should feel himself to be stronger, more formidable, more integrated than this other.

  Under conditions of that kind, with every nuance of this “formula” satisfied, he could be tender, pitiful, and even clairvoyant; as he had been, almost to the last, in his feeling about Netta; but when this “formula,” this symbolic projection of the realistic fact reflected in the distorting lens of his mind, was broken up by a differently adjusted balance of relations, in place of tenderness he was liable to feel a blind hostility, and in place of pity a cold-blooded vindictive malice.

  His “love-making” with Cousin Ann had always been of a very light and a very superficial sort, from his side of the encounter; just because the strength of her nature precluded that protective or possessive thrill which his vice demanded; and now that he found himself actually married to her, nothing that her brilliance or her beauty or her grand manner could achieve gave him the faintest sensual pleasure.

  Rook’s was the kind of nature that derives no satisfaction from sensual emotion unless it is at liberty to disparage rather than to idealize; to pity rather than to admire; to possess rather than be possessed; and in every one of these requisites he was outraged and frustrated by his marriage with his cousin.

  What he really required of life was not an impassioned love with an equal mate, but certain faint, vague, elusive ecstasies that were entirely unspiritual, entirely unemotional, and entirely de-personalized. Women were to him not human souls to be loved for themselves but just vibrant quivering telegraph wires, from which, as they stretched across land and river and hill in their long mysterious reach, the rain-scented winds of night and morning drew magical hummings and whisperings and wild sad prophecies!

  Rook had never possessed any sense of proportion; and he was especially liable to let his moods become manias when they were associated with anything physiological. At that moment he got the sensation that his brain was going to burst like the seeds of a gorse-bush in hot weather, as he contemplated those jet-black beetles revolving in their unwearied circles.

  He felt as if Lady Ann’s personality were actually adhering to his own; and not only adhering to it, but sucking it up; as a whirlpool might suck up a paper boat!

  His imagination got more and more unbalanced; ran riot more and more wildly; as he thought of himself in relation to this cousin-wife. He began to feel as if from henceforth to the day of his death he were destined to be deprived of all separate individual reality, destined to become a mere husk or shell, in the centre of which was nothing that could assert itself, or sink down into itself, but only something that had to reflect, reflect, reflect the thoughts of a completely alien person.

  He felt as though this female creature, to whom he was now so indissolubly linked, were some sinister living growth, fungus-like and carnivorous, that devoured his flesh and drank his blood; something that it would be necessary to cut away from his inmost bones before he could breathe freely or take any natural pleasure in life again.

  The feeling grew and grew upon him, as he stared at that stagnant pond; till it seemed as if some actual magnetic power were menacing him with suffocation! And then, all in a moment, he found himself continuing his slow progress along that interminable pollard-bordered road.

  For some reason or other connected with the tension in his brain, the hedges ceased to be green under that halcyon sky. They became gray, like the colour of wood-ashes. The trunks of the willows, too, became gray; and the lane itself under his feet, its deep clay-stiffened cart ruts and its margins of silverweed and feverfew, became gray as the face of some enormous dead creature upon which he was treading.

  A paralysis of dizziness seized him, mingled with an abysmal loathing for he knew not what. He staggered as he walked and he found himself feebly shaking his head as if to make some overt protestation against a vision of things that his reason still assured him was unreal.

  And then it was that a rider, mounted upon a tall gray horse, came cantering toward him and, pulling up when he reached him, turned his horse round and proceeded to ride by his side along the lane, talking to him as he rode. The horseman was a young man of singularly prepossessing appearance, and as he bent down over the animal’s neck to bring his face nearer to the pedestrian, Rook received a vivid impression that something which had happened to him before was now going to happen again and in exactly the same way.

  He was not in the least surprised to detect in his companion’s face a certain unmistakable resemblance to his own, nor was he startled or in any way shocked when the youth addressed him as “Father.”

  “It is just dizziness,” Rook found himself saying. “It has nothing to do
with what I have been suffering.”

  “You must not suffer, Father,” the youth said gently, stroking his horse’s neck with a light hand.

  “I thought just now,” Rook retorted, “that there was no human being in the world unhappier than I am.”

  “Why are you unhappy, Daddy?” enquired the youthful rider.

  “It’s an indescribable horror,” Rook answered. “Something that a lad like you had better not try to think about. I myself could hardly put it into words. But the effect it has upon me I could describe; only that would make you as miserable as I am.”

  He placed his hand on the edge of the rider’s saddle and the boy laid his own upon it and began caressing it.

  “There’s no need for you to tell me, Daddy,” he murmured. His voice became so low and faint just then that Rook glanced at him anxiously. And it was not only that his voice seemed to sink away like a wind that sighed itself into silence among feebly stirred grasses. His very form and face grew shadowy and indistinct.

  Rook was conscious of making a quick desperate effort to hold both horse and rider near his side. He had the sense of clinging tenaciously to something that was falling back into fathoms of water. The very silence into which the boy’s voice sank, the grayness into which his form dwindled and receded, seemed to be broken and troubled by a confused medley of hummings and murmurings, obscure, indistinct, unintelligible to the man’s ears.

  “I thought just now,” Rook went on, holding tightly to the edge of the rider’s saddle, “that there was no one in the world more cowardly, more contemptible than I am; no one in the world more treacherous, lecherous, and mean-hearted! And then I saw that the green slime was the green slime, that the cattle dung was the cattle dung; and it came into my head that a man has to accept himself for what he is; or if he can’t do that just kill himself and end it!”

  Kill himself and end it! The words seemed to drift away, over the flanks of the horse and over the pollard willows, as if they possessed some palpable body of their own that could not dissolve at once into the air. Rook heard them floating across the fields. Why didn’t they sink into that mass of grayness that now began suffocating him again?

  He made a convulsive clutch at his companion’s fingers, and once more that fresh, fair youthful face leaned down close to his own.

  “It must be the boy from Comber’s End,” he wanted to say to himself; but in place of saying “Comber’s End” the word “Ashover” came into his mind.

  And then again it seemed inevitable and natural that the youth should be murmuring: “It’s all right, Daddy; it’s absolutely all right.”

  “I must tell him about the green slime,” Rook thought insistently. “I must make it clear to him about the cattle dung.”

  “There’s a heron over there, Daddy,” said the young horseman quietly, “and it hasn’t a gray feather on it.”

  For some reason or other the sense of a heron having nothing gray, not one single feather of gray about it filled Rook with indescribable relief.

  “Can it fly?” he whispered.

  But the boy was silent again and once more both horse and rider seemed to recede and recede into an enveloping mist. Frantically Rook clung to those youthful fingers, and as he clung to them they grew warm and firm again under his touch

  “It was the green slime,” the man began again, in a hurried husky voice, his brain full of the one obstinate desire to make a very difficult point clear. “And the cattle dung,” he added, pressing the horseman’s hand against his saddle.

  “What they made me think was that no one who makes any effort to change his nature or to change any one else’s nature has any right to be alive upon the earth.” His voice subsided but he was still driven on by that desperate impatient sense that he must make everything plain before the lad cantered off.

  “Slime—dung—not one gray feather——” he gasped wildly; and then, in a sudden burst of exultant freedom: “No one is worthy to live,” he cried with a loud voice, “who doesn’t know—who doesn’t know——”

  “What, Daddy?” whispered the voice at his side.

  He flung the words into the air now with a ringing triumphant voice.

  “Who doesn’t know that all Life asks of us is to be recognized and loved!”

  The young rider suddenly snatched up the hand with which Rook had been so desperately retaining him and raised it to his lips. Then he gave him a smile the penetrating sweetness of which diffused itself through every fibre of the man’s body.

  “Good-bye, Daddy!” he murmured gently; and whispering some quick word to his horse he gave the bridle a shake and cantered away down the lane.

  The sound of the retreating horse hooves subsided slowly into silence. The boy’s face, so unmistakably resembling his own but with a beauty and power in it beyond anything he had ever approached, remained in his mind as an ineffaceable reality!

  “Recognized and loved,” he muttered; and there arose within him the feeling that it was for the creation of a being like this that all the suffering he had caused and all the horror he had endured found their solution. It was toward this that the invincible life purpose, reaching out from the buried dust of his ancestors to him, had been pushing him blindly forward, tearing a path for it, clearing a way for it, through all his confusions and calamities!

  The rider’s figure was out of sight, however, now; and the beat of his horse’s hooves was quite silent. The feeling which had arisen from some subconscious recess in the man’s nature died down with their vanishing. Rook surveyed the empty road in front of him with a vague, incredulous smile. Then he shook his head in the same feeble protesting manner as he had done before.

  “Rook Ashover, you must look to your wits!” he muttered; and he struck at a tall patch of hog weed out of which fluttered a tortoise-shell butterfly.

  All sorts of quite irrelevant and even ridiculous things came into his mind. He remembered a wooden sword that he had played with as a child and he saw distinctly the gray dilapidated mane of a hobbyhorse he used to ride. Then there came suddenly into his head the word “Gorm,” written upon a ghostly signpost.

  “That boy must be the boy from Comber’s End,” he repeated mechanically. But as soon as he had formulated the words he remembered that it was when he himself was a boy that he used to meet the farmer’s son of that remote manor house.

  The face of the countryside had retaken its natural colour from him now. The appalling grayness which had so mysteriously fallen upon it had completely vanished.

  “I must have worried myself into some sort of fit,” he thought. “I wonder if I fell down just now and have been lying on the road, as Mother used to say I did when I was a boy. God! I must be a bit more careful how I let my thoughts run away with me! I wonder if someone on horseback did pass me by, or pick me up? But what on earth could I have said to the chap? He must have thought I was drunk. God! I must have seemed perfectly mad to him! I talked to him as if he were Ann’s child grown into a man. And he talked to me like that.”

  He pulled his hat down over his head and walked steadily forward, puzzled and disturbed. He could see the end of the lane now, about a quarter of a mile in front of him. It merged itself in a broad highway, the famous Roman road between Salisbury and Exeter, and at the point where it met the road stood a copse of larches, incredibly fresh and green against the southern sky.

  Rook continued to review with a sullen puzzled obstinacy his recent experience. What annoyed him was that he kept seeing that green slime and those trodden cattle droppings; and then completely losing the thread of everything. Had he fainted there by the pond and just dreamed about the rest? But when he came to his senses he was out of sight of the pond. He must have got up and walked on, still in a state of unconsciousness! He had heard of people doing that kind of thing. What did they call it? Amnesia. Well! He must stop letting his thoughts run on into these wretched manias. He had been worrying himself too much. Marriage? Well! Other men had made fools of themselves before, without
falling into these morbid spasms of horror. Was he, deep down in his subconscious nerves, twisted in some way, unnatural, abnormal, without the ordinary masculine feelings about women? He knew that the excitement with which he was now hurrying to Comber’s End was something beyond any emotion he had ever felt in awaiting a rendezvous with a woman.

  Was that fainting-fit into which he had fallen just a mental reaction from some deep shock of physical aversion connected with his marriage to his cousin?

  He stood quite still under the green clump of larches and pondered on this with a scowling brow.

  What nonsense! He remembered how wonderful and lovely that night in Drools’ cottage had been. Was it nothing but the heady fumes of that rich Dorchester ale, nothing but the sorcery of those snow-burdened midnight spaces, that had cast such a glamour over that encounter? Was he, down deep below all his love affairs, an indurated, an incorrigible misogynist? He shuddered a little as the memory of the nausea through which he had passed reapproached the threshold of his consciousness. He shook it off with a jerk of his head and a wave of his stick; and started at a swinging, resolute stride, northward, along the highway.

  “I’m tough enough to survive these shocks,” he thought to himself; “and I can drink my draught of Lethe and forget them all.”

  He looked around him now with a return of his natural de-personalized passion for that perpetually changing face of the Frome valley.

  “Forget them all,” he repeated to himself: and out of the depths of his soul he uttered a kind of inarticulate prayer to those green pastures, to those leafy woods, to those sailing clouds, that he might remain to the end their unperturbed, unaffrighted votary!