Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

The most dominant and most recurrent of these thoughts if they had been translated into definite words would have run as follows: “Rook is pining for Netta, who will never understand him as I understand him. But he wants her; he is full of remorse about her. Left to Ann and Ann’s child, he will eat his heart out in utter misery. I alone can save him by bringing Netta into his life again.”

  The day that dawned upon this eventful night was a dark and strange one even for that unusual September. It suggested rain; but it was not raining. It suggested thunder; but there was no thunder. Only, without the assistance of any frost or of any apparent wind, the first fluttering down of leaves took place in all manner of unexpected directions.

  Even Hastings felt the influence of the day. “Don’t you smell something queer in the air this morning, Nell?” he said to her at breakfast.

  The girl nodded in silence, waiting for the right moment to make her momentous announcement.

  “It’s extraordinarily odd,” he went on, “but I keep being conscious of some subtle smell—in this room—in the garden—in the road—that I haven’t noticed since I was a child. It’s not exactly a smell, either! It’s more than that. It’s a taste in the mouth and a strange indescribable feeling through every pore of the body.”

  Nell did begin to listen to him now, lifting up her chin between a vase of salpiglossis and a vase of cinerarias, both of them brought from the Ashover garden by Rook.

  “I keep thinking of all sorts of little objects connected with my life when I was a child,” Hastings continued. “I see the backs of certain volumes of the Latin classics my father used to read. My father was a cobbler, Nell. Have I ever told you that? But he had a mania for reading Latin. He was not a learned man. It was a sort of fantastic game with him. And there’s something about the smell of this air that makes me think of London pavements and the peculiar feeling of the wet city mist on your face when you open a window into a room lit by gas and crowded with leather-bound books.”

  He sank into silence again; but his face bore such a happy, dreamy expression that Nell was quite shocked by his next words when, after a long pause, he looked across at her with a light in his eyes.

  “I shall take my book up again this morning,” he said. “I’ve been getting a new angle on it during these nights with Ashover. I’ve been tapping his brain without his knowing it—not for ideas exactly—but to get my own thoughts into focus.”

  He rose from the table as he spoke and going to the window opened it a little farther.

  “There’s the smell of something more than rain out there,” he said. “If you want to know what I really think, Nell, I think there’s a terrific thunderstorm coming up! Perhaps it’s that which brings what I have to write next in my book—my chapter of all chapters, Nell!—with such a mad rush into my mind.”

  He moved back to his chair, but instead of reseating himself, he leant against it, keeping his eyes fixed upon her and growing more and more excited.

  “I believe I could finish the whole thing if I really got started to-day, Nell. I’ve only four more chapters. But they’re the difficult ones. That’s why I’ve been letting it go lately. They’re the ones that explain the actual process of cosmic unravelling. They’re the ones that give the clue to the unwinding of the clock!”

  She looked at his illuminated and disturbed face with a scrutinizing eye. Had he the natural human intelligence to grasp all she meant to do by having Netta here? One could never tell with him! There was an obstinate wilfulness in the man that might sheer off at any tangent, at any moment. “Shall I speak to him now?” she thought. “Or shall I wait?”

  Her decision, like so many human decisions, was brought to a head by something entirely outside her control. She caught sight of the village postman passing their gate, an occurrence that meant that in the space of about half an hour, giving him time to reach Ashover House and return, he would be passing it again and consequently be at hand to enable her to carry out her precipitate plan.

  She moved straight up to her husband, and in a low, hurried, eager voice confessed what she had overheard and what she wished to do.

  The criss-cross currents that tossed themselves into spray within the depths of the priest’s mind took two main directions as he listened to her breathless suggestion.

  The first of these tidal currents was full of a heavy sulkiness at being betrayed into giving up his secret; a secret which had become a sort of fetish with him as being the symbol of his malignant advantage over Rook Ashover. It was just because those harmless syllables, “Thirteen Walpole Street,” had become a kind of mania with the man that he had been overheard muttering them in his sleep; and now Nell was in possession of them!

  But the second of these two mental tides contradicted the mood of the first. By having Nell and Rook so often recently under his eye his jealousy had gathered momentum; while the perverse forms of malignity which at the start had supplied an antidote to this jealousy were beginning to lose their savour and to grow tiresome and insipid.

  There were several reasons why Nell’s surprising suggestion did not altogether displease him. For one thing he felt sure it would mean the end of this platonic philandering between his wife and Ashover. Rook could hardly make use of Toll-Pike Cottage as a rendezvous for two love affairs! In the second place, it would cause definite and emphatic annoyance to Lady Ann; for whom, ever since he had learnt that she was to be a mother, he had nourished one of his queer half-neurotic, half-metaphysical aversions.

  As Nell talked to him now she could see from his expression that his feelings were not by any means simple. She had recourse therefore to a grand feminine coup, which came to her by a sort of inspiration.

  “You know what you have so often felt,” she pleaded, “with regard to all our friends here? Well—that, at any rate, will be quite different when you’ve asserted yourself between Netta and Rook.”

  He stared at her in clouded bewilderment. What on earth did she mean? He could not believe that she saw quite as clearly as her hint implied the gaping depths of the hurt to his self-love which his position as the priest of the village had worked in him.

  “You mean?” he murmured tentatively.

  She looked straight at him now; and, like so many essentially honest and unscheming women, she found that the very integrity of her nature gave her a power, when she was embarked on a campaign of diplomacy, far more effective than any actual cunning in argument.

  “I mean that it’ll be more of a relief to me than I can tell you for you to be worthy of yourself and in the open over Mr. Ashover. I can’t explain to you what it’ll mean to me, William, to be free of this horrid sense that you’re doing something shameful and unkind, like this hiding up Netta’s address! It’s made a difference to me already—just our talking freely like this about it! And if we send our telegram and have Netta here I shall feel still happier! I do think, William dear, that none of them have looked to you for your help and advice in their lives, as they naturally might have done, considering, after all, that you are the vicar of the place!”

  She watched him anxiously; and a glow of excitement came into her face when she saw that her words had not been without their effect.

  “You mustn’t think,” she went on, “that my friendship with Mr. Ashover prevents my seeing how coolly, to say the least of it, both he and Lexie treat you in your position as priest. It’s the one thing about them that I’ve never understood.” She stopped and glanced quickly at him, wondering whether she had let herself go too far.

  “I’m glad to have been able to tell you this, William,” she added. “Because I feel so much that it only wants a little more respect on both sides for you and Mr. Ashover to get on splendidly together.”

  She had won her point. She knew it as clearly as if he had thrown up both his hands and cried out: “I yield!” Her victory was almost as unexpected as it was complete. She did not estimate, because it was outside her knowledge of the man’s metaphysical mania, the part played in his yielding by h
is mysterious hostility to Rook’s wife. Still less did she realize how much of it was due to a certain queer tenderness which he had come to feel for Netta herself, a tenderness that was, in the last resort, a kind of sympathy of pariah for pariah, of one child of the people for another child of the people.

  “Then I can write the telegram?” she cried impulsively. And making a swift childish clutch at one of Hastings’s hands she raised it to her mouth.

  It was this gesture more than anything that she had done which reconciled him to her victory. There is nothing in the world more calculated to establish a man in his own esteem than to feel the lips of a young girl against his fingers! The psychological effect of such a thing, reverting to dim, far-off pre-Homeric times, carries a magic along with it capable of seducing the coldest-blooded philosopher.

  Hastings watched her scribbling the telegram on a piece of paper. He heard her muttering aloud those familiar syllables: “Thirteen Walpole Street,” which he had himself been so malignantly and triumphantly whispering under his breath for the last half year. He derived a peculiar physical relief, like the drawing of a piece of rusty iron out of his flesh, at the mere sound of those words on another’s lips, and while his wife rushed out with the telegram to the postman he found himself running up the stairs to his room with a clearer mind and a more lively desire to continue his life’s work than he had felt since the day of Netta’s flight.

  The woman had been more on his mind than he had acknowledged to himself; and his recondite revenge upon Rook, by refusing her address, had been a severer strain upon his nerves than he had calculated upon. Well! He was clear of it. He would have the whip hand of them all now. He would henceforth be in a position to assert himself as the formidable spiritual director of all these people!

  He sat down at his table and drew out his manuscript. The sight of these closely written impassioned pages changed the current of his thoughts once more. What did it matter whether these people treated him properly or not? What did it matter whether he was an effective parish priest or not? What did it matter whether his gentle Nell kissed his hand or not? Long, long years after he was dust in dust, after there was no longer any living creature who remembered him, his work would still be exercising its effect upon the universe; the wonder of the disillusioned, the terror of the illusioned!

  For the rest of that day Hastings worked silently, passionately, upon his book. When he came down to lunch he was like a different man. Nell had never known him in such high spirits. He gossiped about the village people. He told her stories about his early struggles, his desperate youthful attempts to get an adequate education, his experiences at various theological colleges.

  The girl thought to herself, “If he’d been like this a year ago, I would never have gone out so much with Lexie.” Had Nell been more superstitious than she was she would have felt uneasy in the presence of this unnatural exuberance. An occult-minded person would have watched William Hastings very closely at that juncture and would perhaps have endeavoured to calm and allay this stream of excited talk. But Nell’s own spirits were so exalted just then at the despatching of the telegram and the idea of Netta’s arrival that she responded to his mood with a mood of like kind. Never had Toll-Pike Cottage heard such voices and such laughter. It would have taught the evasive Rook something he did not know as to the nature of women could he have seen the apparently complete and radiant accord that existed between these two. All through the afternoon, until tea-time, Hastings worked on; writing with scarcely a glance out of the window or away from the page; as if it were necessary to finish the book that very day.

  After one of the happiest teas they had ever had since they were married, Nell announced that she intended to make Mr. Twiney drive her down to Bishop’s Forley station; so that, in case Netta had been at home when the telegram reached her and had started at once by the first train, she might not be left stranded.

  Hastings shook his head. “You’re assuming too much, young lady,” he remarked. “The chances are all against her being in the house when your message arrives. And why should she start in such a hurry? The natural thing would be to give herself at least a night to think over it.”

  Nell looked at him significantly. “That shows how little you know about women,” she said. “There’s probably not been a day since she left when she hasn’t imagined herself rushing off back again just like this! What I said in the telegram was that we both thought that she ought to come, that it was important she should come. That would bring me without waiting overnight, if I were in her place!”

  Hastings smiled grimly. “You and Netta are different people, Nell. And there’s another thing, too. You seem to assume that she’s got the money to come. I must say I think that’s a rather big assumption.”

  Nell’s face crinkled itself into a fit of giggling at this.

  “How funny you are, William,” she gasped. “Didn’t you see me go to my chest of drawers just now? I gave the postman five pounds to telegraph with the message!”

  Hastings stared at her. “Five pounds? Where did you get that from, Nell?”

  She laughed still more at this.

  “Where—do—you—suppose I get—money—from?” she murmured. “Do you think someone gives it to me?”

  “I give it up completely,” he cried. “You’re too much for me to-day, young woman.”

  She made the shadow of a childish grimace at him, more in the manner of a daughter than a wife; a look that if Rook had caught he would have felt a malicious suspicion that all the romantic glamour he had come to associate with her was in some sort of way a trick that had been played upon him.

  It is doubtful whether there is any man in the world who, if he saw all the flickers of expression in the face he is enamoured of, would not be shocked to the foundations of his being; and both Rook and Hastings were such megalomaniacal subjectivists, that as far as they were concerned there really were two quite distinct Nells who doubtless inhabited the same slender frame! It was doubtless Lexie who came nearer than either of them to see the girl as she actually was.

  “It’s your own money!” she cried radiantly. “Well! We’ll see whether you’re right or I’m right about her coming to-day. But I’m going to meet this train, anyhow!”

  She was going out of the room when he stopped her with a new tone in his voice.

  “Have you given a single thought to the future?” he began. “I mean have you considered what’s going to become of Netta after we have got her here?”

  Nell made an impatient little gesture with her slender fingers.

  “That’s just like a man!” she cried. “Always calculating and weighing. How do we know anything about the future? We may none of us live beyond this autumn!”

  The priest lifted his eyebrows and let it go. After all, whatever the upshot of all this was to be, it was a matter for Rook and Netta to settle between themselves. And it did seem to him clear that any issue would be better than the present uncertainty and misunderstanding.

  He withdrew to his room and launching out once more upon the dark tide of his impassioned logic, forgot Nell, Netta, Rook, and all terrestrial happenings in that unique absorption in the pure pleasure of laying thought upon thought, speculation upon speculation, which can give, to those who abandon themselves to its fascination, a delight that surpasses every sensual happiness.

  It was nearly ten o’clock that night when he heard through his open window the wheels of Twiney’s conveyance stopping at the garden gate.

  He listened. Two women’s voices! So Nell had been right in her premonition, and Netta had come! He pushed his papers aside and ran down the stairs to welcome them at the door.

  He had no time at the moment to do more than shake hands with the newcomer; for he had to help Mr. Twiney carry up her trunk to the attic room; but a few minutes later, when they were all three together in the parlour, he received his first intimation of how little they either of them knew of what was going on in their visitor’s mind.

 
; “I’m so glad you came, Netta,” he said in a kindly, almost paternal tone. “What Nell thought was that something had to be done! She was afraid that Mr. Ashover was working himself into such agitation about you that it was cruel to keep you hidden away any more. Though I did obey you, didn’t I, in holding your secret tight?”

  “I knew you,” broke in Nell, “better than William. He thought you’d wait till to-morrow. But I was sure you’d come to-day.”

  They both surveyed their silent visitor with friendly curiosity. Netta was quietly and unassumingly dressed. In general appearance, when she pushed up her veil, she looked quite unchanged. But there was something about her manner that made it hard to talk as naturally and openly as they expected to do as soon as Mr. Twiney’s back was turned.

  “Mr. Ashover is not ill, I hope?” she asked in a low voice.

  “Ill?” cried Hastings. “I should think not! And it’s Nell, not I, who’s got this idea of his being so worried. Besides, it’s not only about our Netta that he’s been worrying. I suppose you’ve heard——”

  He stopped suddenly, catching a quick warning look on his wife’s face.

  “When is the child to be born?” asked Netta quietly.

  “Oh, pretty soon now, so they tell me,” Hastings replied. “I daresay it’s the kind of thing that Mr. Ashover finds especially trying,” he added. “But I’m sure he’ll be so thankful to have his mind set at rest about you that he’ll be a different person to-morrow.”

  “I sha’n’t be a burden on you long,” said Netta. “I’ve told Nell that it’s only a very short little visit.” She made an affectionate movement toward her hostess and laid her hand upon her arm. “I can’t let Nell’s hospitality make me a trouble to you,” she went on, “and I won’t let it either!” she added with a smile.

  Hastings drew back, baffled and puzzled. Netta had teased him before with a certain society air which he regarded as an affectation; but her present tone was different from that. It was the tone of a person who has a definite and unalterable plan in his own mind and who is just diplomatically sparring to gain time. There was something about Netta’s reserve, something in her manner and in the expression of her eyes, that thoroughly puzzled him.