Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  “Give me those tablets, Rook, or I shall get angry! You needn’t blame Twickenham. I only get the prescription from him. The chemist makes them up. He’s an old friend of mine. You don’t know him. He’s a great fisherman and we talk of flies. He knows me too well to be afraid that I shall take one tablet more than the right amount. And no one but you would ever dream of a person taking morphia tablets in his sleep. Give them back, Rook, or I shall get very angry with you, and that may finish me off!”

  His face became so agitated that Rook did grow afraid as to the effect such excitement might have, and drawing out the box he laid it down on the grass by the side of the empty one.

  At that moment Lexie struggled hurriedly to his feet. “There’s a White Admiral!” he cried in childish eagerness. And sure enough, clinging to a beech leaf on a bough that was just above their heads, its wings drawn back so that the translucent loveliness of their green-veined sides was revealed in full sunshine, swung this rare and exquisite butterfly.

  Rook watched his brother standing there with his back to him, his arm extended and his hand moving slowly and tremblingly toward the unsuspecting creature, evidently, from its flawless freshness, just emerged from its chrysalis. How often had he surveyed in old days this familiar figure, stealing up toward some gorgeous hoverer, his whole being absorbed and rapt in the intensity of the chase.

  There! Lexie had made his snatch at it, but the White Admiral had slipped away and was fanning its wings, wide-open now so that its proud black-and-white markings were distinctly visible, on another beech twig farther away.

  Lexie moved toward it and once more stealthily lifted his hand.

  It may have been that this familiar vision, redolent of old, sweet memories, brought to the elder brother’s mind, in one unbearable rush of bitter thought, the feeling that henceforth he no longer possessed his own independent identity; or it may have been that ever since he first saw Lexie with that little box, the idea had been vaguely stirring within him that it would be wise to have such a key to final escape safely in his keeping! Whichever way it was, just at the moment when Lexie was most absorbed, Rook quickly opened the full box, emptied about twenty of the tablets into the other one and thrust the two boxes into different pockets.

  Among the many movements made by the animals and the birds in the environs of Comber’s End on that loveliest of midsummer days it was significant enough that the two most symbolic and expressive ones made by mortal men should have been a movement to capture one tremulous living creature and a movement to set free another; to capture a White Admiral butterfly, and to set free—hospes comesque corporis—a human soul, fooled to the top of its bent.

  CHAPTER XXI

  JULY passed and August came. The halcyon weather of the Comber’s End day had not lasted very long. The latter half of July was gusty and cold. In many of the cornfields the wheat lay prostrate, beaten down and rain-sodden; while the hedge flowers, such as knapweed and scabious and ragwort, had that look of overweighted overgreen foliage and undersized rain-blighted blossoms such as indicates the absence of long hours of uninterrupted sunshine.

  But with the coming of August all this changed. The prostrate corn lifted itself up a little. The roads grew dusty. The fairy rings on Battlefield turned pale green; the turf around them became bleached and yellowish; while the taller grasses at the edges of the fields assumed that shade of old mellow gold which answered to the ripening of the grain at their side.

  The effect of the preceding stormy weather had been to produce an anticipation of autumn in certain aspects of that harvest season, in others to retard the autumn’s approach with a kind of second midsummer. It was only on the higher uplands and on the slopes of the hills, where the soil was lighter and more gravelly, that the grass embrowned itself and lost its sap. In the valleys it remained moist, even after many long, hot days; and though groups of trees, here and there, that had been exposed to the rains and winds carried signs of their ill-usage, the more protected ones, in the depths of the Antiger Woods, for instance, were as richly green still as in the early days of June.

  But a week of hot sun and sultry twilights soon manifested its effects. All along the banks of the Frome great spikes of purple loosestrife alternated with the ragged clumps of hemp agrimony and with the rose-coloured tufts of willow herb. The ditches of the water meadows were overgrown with meadowsweet; and under the crowded stems of the hazel copses the yellowing leaf spears of the dead bluebells were covered with masses of enchanter’s nightshade.

  But the real quality of these cloudless August days was to be found in the cornfields. Here amid the tall yellow stalks and the grain-swollen ears of wheat and barley rose up as if over night, millions and millions of poppy flowers. Something about the texture of these filmy scarlet petals, as if they had been made of the blood of the earth itself, shed by hot sun kisses and staunched by hot sun breath, carried the very secret of that season from field to field and across the white haze-tremulous roads.

  Little quivering vibrations in the air, waves of heat, would be seen floating now over the tops of thyme-scented banks or over the burnished metallic surface of the bracken. And as these flickering heat waves drew their faint purplish veil between one’s eyes and the landscape, they brought with them the feeling, even in the midst of some brief stroll abroad after early tea, that one was upon a long, significant journey; a journey to a country quite unknown, to great dim cities with towers and spires, far off, over leagues and leagues of shimmering poppy-stained vapour!

  And indeed, as one great spacious golden morning followed another, there did seem to grow upon the consciousness of more than one of the persons living in Ashover the feeling that they were being carried forward on some steady-keeled purple-sailed galleon toward the unknown marvels of an unknown harbour.

  Lady Ann, now beginning the eighth month of her pregnancy, seldom left the garden. For hours she would sit on her chair under the linden tree, her hands idly clasped upon the book in her lap, her eyes fixed on the shadows on the grass.

  Rook had become more considerate and more tender toward her as her time drew near; but he could not pretend to an excitement he did not feel; and for any sympathy in the paramount question that absorbed her—would her child prove to be a boy?—she was driven to the rather teasing and exhausting speculations of Mrs. Ashover, combined with the old lady’s memories of the pre-natal peculiarities of her own sons.

  It was the beginning of the second week in the month. The herbaceous borders of the Ashover garden had become like little tropical forests of heavily scented blooms to the bumble-bees and humming-bird moths that moved about among them. Round the high stalks of the delphiniums and the hollyhocks all manner of smaller flowers huddled themselves: petunias, verbenas, calceolarias mingling with every variety of campanula.

  “How incredibly secure,” thought Rook to himself, as at about two o’clock in the afternoon of a day that seemed even hotter than the preceding ones he strolled along the flower borders with the vague intention of taking the opportunity of a solitary walk while his mother and his wife both rested and the whole place was hushed in its noon siesta, “how incredibly secure and complacent you do look!” He surveyed half-enviously a small patch of blue lobelia that had got itself wedged in between two tufts of London Pride. “I suppose the life of a lobelia is entirely composed of long delicious passive sensations! I suppose a deep narcissistic ecstasy in its own Tyrian blueness is thrilling through it at this moment, combined with all sorts of mysterious rapports with the earth and air such as our animal senses have absolutely no idea of! I daresay it can even feel the movement of the planet itself; very likely blowing back a lovely freshness upon it, through all this heat, from airs outside any of the airs that we’re conscious of! And it probably has the most subtle nuances of pleasure from its sense of the deep cool earth under its roots. I must tell Twiney to make sure he waters all these beds every evening now!”

  He glanced at his wife’s chair with her book and parasol left up
on it; and it struck his mind how completely this girl of sport and adventure had submitted to her new rôle. He sighed heavily as he turned the corner of the house; for it was borne in upon him that he had made not the least attempt to penetrate the barrier of aristocratic reserve with which this mother of his child had guarded her feelings. She must have been having her panics and her disgusts; as well as her thrilling moments of mysterious pleasure! He certainly had made no attempt to arrive at any real intimacy with her, at any intelligent comprehension of what she was feeling at this crisis in her life.

  What strange creatures human beings were! What obstinate, obdurate walls of egoism separated them from one another and substituted ignorant hostility for imaginative understanding! He walked round the house and down the kitchen-garden path where the rows of dahlias, tied to tall sticks, were still only masses of dark glossy foliage with chilly sour-looking globular buds that in their immaturity seemed to reject rather than welcome the noon heat. The difference between these sap-cold shining-leafed plants and the warm bloom of the peaches ripening so fast against the hot red bricks of the great garden wall fell in with his fatalistic thoughts; seemed to suggest the same insurmountable divergencies in the vegetable world as existed in human nerves!

  But how infinitely shut away from vexations and tribulations the garden was, with its floating breaths from mint and rosemary, with its vague, sweet, diffused essence of ripening fruit under the hot, tarry netting, where the wasps buzzed and the white butterflies played!

  The place seemed to hold up invisible barriers against everything in the world that was not gracious and time-mellowed. Mild ghosts of generations of placid gardeners seemed to bend over those well-weeded furrows of brown earth mould; seemed to raise old wrinkled sunburnt hands to the rusty nail heads and mouldering shreds of cloth which held the smooth twigs of the apricots; seemed to shuffle along those quiet paths carrying musk-scented geranium plants from “frame” to flower bed!

  The spot seemed in some especial sense the accumulated retort of the human race to all the elements of chaos. Rook felt, as he loitered in it, as though the absence from his own days of the sort of patient diurnal labour which for generations had made all this possible was the central cause of his discontent.

  He passed out at last into the orchard; and from the orchard into the open uplands. The slope of Battlefield as he made his way between gorse and bracken was sweet with the invisible scent of thyme. It was difficult not to tread upon tufts of euphrasia and milkwort; and when he reached the top of the hill the hot, windless suction of the noon’s leonine mouth had filled the air so full with the odour of pine bark and turpentine and fir needles that he felt as if the trouble of human thoughts were a kind of foreign intrusion, an ill-mannered and irrelevant guest, amid the largesse of all this earth life.

  Instead of exhausting him, the heat of that hour of the day seemed to put a sort of magnetic fever into his blood. He ran down the slope of Dorsal, sweating from every pore, but with an almost fierce exuberance of energy. Reaching Antiger Lane he turned to the right, away from the Drools’ cottage, and began striding up the road at a great pace, swinging his stick as he walked. He soon passed the place where Ann had confessed to him just four months ago that she was with child, but even the sight of the hedge and bank and gate and trees at that particular point did not destroy the careless aplomb of his mood.

  By degrees the nature of the scenery on the side of the lane facing the Antiger Woods changed its character. The hillside diminished to a gentle upward incline and by the time he arrived at a point parallel with the village of Ashover this slope became a field of ripe wheat.

  What wind there was—an almost imperceptible breath from the east—reached his senses across this cornfield; and the smell of the ripe ears, like a quintessential airy diffusion of the bread of life itself, passed into his veins and increased the heathen exuberance of his blood. For the first time since he had seen that white swan’s neck curving so provocatively at Comber’s End, Rook immersed himself in the great undertide of the world’s sensual life. All sorts of passing impressions, selected at random out of the things he had seen that day, conspired together to push him on into this fatal humour. The blue lobelia was there, the yellow wasps were there, the rusty nails in the scraps of cloth against the hot brick wall were there, the tonic fragrance of the fir trees; and now this sense of the bounty of the gods in the “living bread” of the generations!

  There came over him the old mysterious classic acceptance of life upon the earth, of birth and death, of pleasure and sorrow, of love and the loss of love; and he had the feeling that whatever might be the issue of all these things for him, it was enough that they had been just as they had been. The horror that is never very far away, the loathing and the sick mad dread, seemed to fall off from his thoughts like scum from a boat’s prow.

  That immense noon heat, large and indolent and yellow pelted, like a great planetary lion, had licked up with its burning tongue all the poison and putridity.

  He was immensely surprised, as he turned a corner of the lane, to encounter the redoubtable Mr. Twiney seated luxuriously in his familiar cart while his long-necked mare cropped the grass by the hedge.

  Rook had no sooner caught sight of Mr. Twiney’s face than he knew that something had ruffled the man’s equanimity. The blue smoke from his pipe ascended in a thin spiral wisp and wavered among the thick sycamore leaves above his head as if it had been the tail of some dreamy feline ghost; but Mr. Twiney’s tone did not correspond with the placidity of the smoke.

  “Heigh! And what be Squire Ash’ver doing, then, this peevish-hot day? Ain’t it enough to make man and beast sweat their selves into rain pipes; and grow as slippy as eels in pond mud?”

  “It certainly is pretty hot, Twiney,” said Rook, wiping his forehead. “How does your wife stand this kind of weather?”

  Mr. Twiney sat erect at this and eyed him with a defensive and suspicious eye.

  “Me old woman be snappish in winter, prickish in ploughing time, and all heads-and-tails in harvest. But come summer, same as us has now, and she be sweet as oil of Lebanon. I wish other folks were as well-spoken as my old woman be.”

  Rook undid the buttons of his waistcoat and tugged at his flannel shirt so as to let the air touch his skin.

  “Who is it you’re waiting for?” he enquired.

  The owner of the mare gave the back of his grazing animal a gentle flick with his whip.

  “Them sting flies be poisonous bad for horseflesh,” he remarked meditatively. “What they do feed on when there ain’t no horses where they do bide passes me comprehension.”

  “Twiney, who are you waiting for?” Rook repeated in a more abrupt tone.

  The man looked at him rather dubiously. “I suppose I ain’t giving away no lady’s secrets nor no gentleman’s either, when I tell ’ee, Squire, that ’tis thee own brother that I’ve a-brought here, long wi’ Missy Hastings from Toll-Pike.”

  “Oh, naturally—quite right—very nice. I’m so glad.” These meaningless syllables fell from Rook’s lips as if they had been over-ripe apples detaching themselves from a motionless bough on a windless night.

  The man in the cart watched him closely, but the indolent and casual expression on Mr. Twiney’s freckled face made him appear as one who while observing everything observed nothing.

  “They be gone to Titty’s Ring, Squire,” he said pensively. “’Twere only a few minutes agone that they set out. I saw the tail o’n vanishing into wood by yon hedge gap. Don’t ’ee be worritted, Squire! Master Lexie walked as upright as if he’d never had an illness in’s life. I said to ’un, ‘Don’t ’ee kill yourself with exercise, Master Lexie!’ and Missy Hastings she laughed in me face like a green yaffle. ‘Let ’un lean on thee arm, as if thee was man and he were woman!’ I said. And Mr. Lexie he answered me short and brusk-like, same as if I’d said somethink indecent. It doesn’t do to speak to quiet men as your brother have spoke to me just now, Squire. All village do know he
hasn’t long to live. And maybe that’s what makes ’un cranky. And we must be considerate with a nice gentleman, as he be. But I bain’t one for brusky speeches, whether from the gentry or from me own wife. I likes to be bespoke soft and easy, Squire Ash’ver, as well as any man in England.”

  “I’m sure my brother meant no harm. And I’m sure Mrs. Hastings didn’t mean to laugh in your face, Twiney. I can’t imagine either of them doing such a thing. Well! Good-day to you! If I happen to meet them I’ll tell them that you’re still waiting.”

  He began to move off, but Mr. Twiney’s indignation was not yet appeased.

  “I think you ought to know it, Squire, though I’m not the one to tell you. But they do say down village that Mr. Lexie and Missy Hastings be up to no good in these goings on. I’ve a-driven them two into every lane and every cattle drive round these parts. I think it’s only due to ’ee, Mr. Ash’ver, seeing as you’re Squire and such-like, to let ’ee know how the wind be blowing!”

  “All right, Twiney; I’m much obliged to you, Twiney; but you mustn’t listen to the village gossip, you know. Good-day to you!” And with unctuous discretion on his tongue but black anger in his heart he strode down the lane.

  So this was why he had been seeing so little of Lexie during the last fortnight! The rogue had stolen a march on him and had been up to serious mischief with that romantic little idiot! He found it impossible to see the thing in a reasonable or magnanimous light. A few weeks ago he would have shrugged his shoulders and washed his hands of the matter. Nell belonged to Hastings; not to him. She had never really belonged to him! Why was it, then, that he felt so maliciously angry with both her and his brother? He refused to attempt to analyze what he felt. He just gave himself up to a blind irrational grievance; to a sense of having been betrayed by his brother and fooled by the girl.