He got up from the ground and yawned. When Lexie yawned he did so with the earthy shamelessness of a wild animal.
“Let’s walk back to my place together, Rook,” he said. “We could stop at Toll-Pike on the way, maybe, and see if either of the girls is in! Old Hastings, Nell tells me, has started off like a maniac at that book of his. She says he writes day and night now; and hardly stops to eat his meals. It’s lucky for her that she has got Netta with her.”
They crossed the graveyard together. “Well! Well!” Lexie continued, “It’s something that you and I are still walking on a good gravel path side by side. I might so easily be now lying under that elm trunk with the beard growing on my chin and evil-smelling rheum running out of my eyes and nostrils! Yet here we are, looking forward to an excellent tea with black-currant jam among my phloxes, and very likely a couple of sweet-natured wenches to enjoy it with us! How any one can ever worry himself about the shuffling of the cards, as long as there are any cards to shuffle—that’s what I cannot understand, brother Rook.”
They emerged into the road and proceeded to wander slowly through its white dust watching the heavy-winged tarnished peacock butterflies flutter before them from silverweed to silverweed.
“Think what it would be like,” said Lexie, “if every human being left a thin silvery trail behind him like the slime of a snail! Think of such a trail crossing and recrossing its tracks from where it first leaves its perambulator to where it climbs into bed for the last time! Our tracks must pretty often have gone over the same ground, side by side along this road. And yet it is an absolute and irrevocable certainty that one of these walks together will be our last.”
Rook’s thoughts were preoccupied at that moment with the stark question, a question that gave him the sensation of looking into a gaping wound which had begun to fester, as to what kind of a tilt or twist or secret palliative he could administer to this truculent life illusion of his, so as to endure Netta’s conversion, his child’s birth, his mother’s senile jubilation, and this indescribable separation from Lexie which Lexie seemed too egoistic and self-absorbed even to notice!
“One of these walks will be our last,” his brother was saying. Didn’t he have the wit to recognize that this “last” had already happened?
They approached the clump of alders that overhung the sheep-washing pool. This was the point where the river turned sharply to the right, heading for the water meadows, and was crossed by a wooden bridge bordered by the same kind of whitewashed railings as skirted the preceding strip of road.
In the centre of this bridge the two brothers came to a pause, leaning against the railing and looking away over the barley fields, now a misty expanse of golden stubble, which sloped up toward Heron’s Ridge.
“Do you remember how we used to call this bridge ‘Foulden’s Bridge,’ for no reason except that we had a nursery-maid called ‘Foulden’ who used to meet that old villain Pod here of a fine summer’s evening?”
Lexie chuckled as he uttered these words with an unctuous comprehensive historic chuckle which “flew low,” so to speak, like a great flopping mallard, over all the days of all the years of both their lives!
Rook did not trouble himself to answer this particular remark. The two brothers were so content in each other’s society that they had a way of thinking aloud; each one pursuing his own deep-indented furrow of contemplation; quite satisfied if now and again these isolated trails crossed one another, like Lexie’s silvery snail tracks!
“I think the most delicious moments of my life,” said Rook dreamily, “if I put aside the very best of our excursions together, have come when I’ve been walking by myself along some road I’ve never seen before. Are you listening, Lexie?”
His brother bent over the railing to watch the course of a bit of wood which he had flung into the water. He lifted up his head presently. “One minute!” he remarked. “Don’t forget what you were going to tell me; but I want to see”—and he flung another piece of wood after the first—“I want to see whether it’s Rook or Lexie who gets safe under the bridge!”
Rook leaned over the white-washed railing by his side. The Frome ran shallow and weedy just there. A few slender dace, with their heads upstream, were letting the current carry them languidly backward; while at the side of the river, where the water ran over clear sunlit pebbles, a great shoal of minnows were hovering and darting, like little tongues of quicksilver.
“There we go!” cried Lexie, giving his brother one of those looks of complicated naïveté and subtlety which always troubled Rook’s mind, as if with the tantalizing proximity of some dimension of human goodness and sweetness which was only offered to be snatched away. “There we go!” And he ran across “Foulden Bridge” to the other side. Rook followed him, puzzled at the eagerness with which he himself, too, awaited the issue of this childish contest.
“I’m out! I’m safe!” cried the younger Ashover, pointing with his stick. Then in a moment his face assumed a most curious mixture of condolence and triumph. “But you’re stuck fast under there! You’re done for, Rook!”
The elder man did at that second of time undergo an unusual and very unexpected sensation, a perfectly direct and unmitigated shock of self-pity, as if he had been suddenly condemned to leave a world full of beauty and happiness.
“Well? Shall we go on?” said Lexie. “I’m glad it was you and not I who sank, because that means that we shall be together this time next year.”
They moved on across the bridge. The road stretched straight in front of them with nothing but the small white square of Toll-Pike Cottage, far away on the left, to break its perspective till it lost itself in the dim autumnal blur, haze-wrapped and purple-shadowed, of Ashover village.
They moved very slowly now, arm-in-arm, scattering the dust with their feet. Each time they prodded the ground with their sticks little white clouds arose, that subsided patiently and sadly after they passed, like the sighs of disappointed watchers.
“What a place in the imagination,” said Rook suddenly, “has come to be taken by dust. Doesn’t it always return to your mind, that scene in Syria, when the Lord stopped and wrote in the dust?”
Lexie swung round. “You mean when He spat in the dust and made clay! It certainly is strange how every incident of that life falls in with the commonest omens of any walk you go. What were you just going to say on the bridge, Rook, when I interrupted you?”
The elder brother frowned. “Oh, nothing,” he said crossly; but after a pause and in an abstracted tone, “I was wanting to clear up a thing that’s always puzzled me. What is it you feel when you’re alone on a strange road, especially when it leads up over a bare hill? Do you suppose it’s an atavistic memory from times when people were more nomadic and more isolated than they are to-day? Or do you think that all the feelings of solitude, accumulated from many generations, are gathered up then; as if there were a person in each of us who was like a kind of Wandering Jew, with a consciousness entirely made up of the vague, faint, half-human impressions of loneliness, a person whose whole long mysterious life, reaching through many centuries, were one solitary journey?”
In place of answering him Lexie pulled him round by the arm and they stood for a while looking back. All the familiar objects that they looked at then—the wooden bridge with its white palings, the dark-green alders by the sheep wash, the square tower of the church, the gray-stone bridge, the clump of thick-foliaged trees that hid Ashover House—all these things that each of them had known from childhood fell into a new and unfamiliar setting, as if they had been discovered off-guard, in some secretive mood that they had been at pains to conceal.
“Don’t you feel,” said Rook, “that we might be at this moment two characters in one of Grimms’ fairy stories? Haven’t you got that odd feeling, that you get in those stories, as if there were nothing really vulgar or banal in the whole world? As if we might see an old woman driving a goose over that first bridge and a man with a pack on his back crossing this second bri
dge, and every door in the village ready to open to the cooking of magic cakes and the purring of great wise all-knowing cats! It’s what comes from living in the same spot all one’s life and then suddenly seeing everything as if you’d never seen it before. The only way to escape from vulgarity and commonness is to live all one’s days in a place like Ashover.” He stopped and drew a long breath. “I don’t think I really should care very much,” he added, “if I should never go ten miles away from here until I died!”
They turned their faces once more toward the village and walked on together without further speech till they came to Toll-Pike Cottage.
Lexie’s anticipations were justified. They found Netta and Nell seated together in the little front garden. They were able to observe the two girls several seconds before they were themselves seen or heard owing to the muffling softness of the white dust and the fact that the women were engaged in an intimate and agitating conversation.
As the brothers watched them across the fence there came into Lexie’s mind that peculiar sense of the passing of time which so often seized and arrested him. That he and Rook on this particular day of September should catch sight of those two, Nell in her white summer frock and Netta in black, talking so earnestly and anxiously, with the little round bed of red geraniums in front of them and the window of Hastings’s study open above their heads, seemed to be one of those events that, common enough in themselves, are yet pregnant in some peculiar way with an unforgettable significance.
“Rook is right,” thought Lexie, “about living in Ashover. It’s the fact of one’s knowing every stick and stone in the background of events that gives to events their heightened value. To get the passing of time one has to possess a dial‚ as it were, on which the hours are marked!” They opened the gate and entered the garden.
Lexie found it piquant to watch this meeting between Netta and his brother. “There are those two,” he thought, “solemnly shaking hands and gravely discussing some indifferent matter, when a year ago they were sharing the same room and using the same water jug.”
His thoughts were impinged upon by a very serious communication from Nell.
“We’re worried about William to-day,” she said. “He’s been writing at that book of his without cessation for the last twelve hours. He got up early this morning, before I was awake, and we haven’t been able to persuade him to come to any meals.”
“Has he eaten anything?” enquired Lexie.
“Hardly anything. I took him some milk and biscuits. He hasn’t locked the door. But when I go in he looks so wild and haggard and gets so angry at being disturbed that I daren’t stop more than a minute. I’m afraid for his mind if he goes on like this. He sat up till three or four this morning. He couldn’t have slept more than two hours. And I didn’t like what he said when I went in.”
“What did he say?”
“It was about Lady Ann and her child. It was awful, Lexie! I can’t think how a sane man can think such appalling thoughts. I don’t believe he is quite sane,” she breathed.
“Can you see him from here?” enquired Lexie, speaking in the tone he might have used if Hastings had been a dangerous otter or badger.
“No. You see? The window’s open but he’s got the blind down. Come here, Lexie. I don’t want Rook to hear us.” They moved away to the other side of the geranium bed.
“Netta, you can’t mean that you’re going back to London without letting me see you once more alone?” Rook spoke these words wistfully and pleadingly but there was an undertone of indignant sullenness in his voice and his eyes had an angry glint.
The girl’s face was very pale; a pallor which the golden September light clinging to her brown hair threw into touching relief. She seemed as Rook looked at her, standing there resolute and sad in her loose black dress, to be thinner and more girlish than in former times.
She was aware that his look had in it a recognition of her physical desirableness; the half-conscious non-mental renewal of an ancient magnetism. She knew that he was recalling with a certain tantalized sulkiness his former possession of her.
“I cannot bear it, Rook dear,” she said gently. “I could bear it if I didn’t love you. But I love you far too well. Don’t make it harder for me, Rook, than it is already!”
He glanced gloomily round; but Lexie and Nell had seated themselves on a wooden bench under the hedge, their eyes directed, not toward himself and Netta, but toward the window of Hastings’s room.
“Come into the house,” he said brusquely, taking her by the shoulder.
She felt so strong in her sadness and in her pity that she allowed him to take her into Nell’s little parlour and shut the door upon them; but her instinctive response to the familiar touch of his hands surprised her by its independence of her conscious mind.
The very moment they were alone the room began to assume that cunning, furtive, pandar-like look that rooms take on when human skeletons of opposite sexes stand in one another’s presence, silent, obsessed, with beating pulses and hammering hearts! Rook’s eyes mechanically noted a grotesquely sentimental picture of Nell as a little girl which stood on the mantelpiece and then without regarding her feeble protests he took Netta in his arms.
Those two human bodies seemed to rush together in a strange complicity of contempt for what was happening to those minds or to those wills. The man pressed his mouth so savagely upon the girl’s mouth that before their kiss was over her lips had parted in helpless abandonment.
He had sworn in his anger that she was “like all women” and she knew in her heart that she had proved herself like many among them in the manner in which she yielded at that moment without really yielding at all She just let him do with her as he pleased because her body already belonged to his body and seemed to return to its possessor with the inevitableness of a compass needle. And yet not for one second did she deviate or collapse from her mental resolution.
As soon as he had removed his mouth from her mouth and had begun to kiss her chin and her neck, this unseduced spirit in her revolted and flung him off. He became suddenly conscious that he was holding a limp, cold, unresponsive husk in his arms, something whose essence was not there at all, a stiff, lifeless simulacrum of the real Netta. He let her sink down into Nell’s one available armchair, the very chair in which she had sat nearly a year ago, when on that day of torrential autumn rain she had come into the room with Cousin Ann.
“There … you see!” he gasped breathlessly. “All this mania of yours is just a morbid fancy that you’ve fallen into by living too much alone. You’re my same Netta … you’ll always be my Netta … nothing that can possibly happen can change that!”
An expression of pitiable sadness came into her face. She looked not only very pale but actually old and haggard at that moment. With the sunlight gone from her hair and her hair itself ruffled by their embrace the gray streaks in its heavy masses became lamentably apparent.
“When you say that it’s wrong for you to live with me any more, does that mean that you and I are to be as if we’d never lived as we have?”
She made an effort to answer him, but it was too much. Those big tears, the sight of which brought back the pathos of her personality more than anything else could have done, those tears as big as the eggs of golden-crested wrens, began one by one to run down her cheeks. She made no effort to dry them. She seemed unconscious of their presence. Nor did the lines of her countenance distort themselves as most people’s faces do when they cry. Her eyes remained wide open and fixed upon his own. Her mouth, too, remained strangely untremulous, its quiet curves set fast in an expression of weary composure.
Very slowly she shook her head; and then, after making some little swallowing movements in her throat, she spoke to him firmly and gently.
“I shall never love any one but you, Rook,” she said, “but I must go back where I came from. The Fathers have been very kind to me and they’ve found me work to do. I’ve got my life to lead somehow, Rook dear. And they’ve been very good
to me. I owe them everything, everything!”
In her desire to explain she had touched just the one chord whose vibration was calculated to hurt him most.
“Everything, Netta?” he repeated with bitter sarcasm. For it was just that, that she should have turned in her despair to other comforters, to other responses, to a different refuge than anything he could supply which hit him to the depths of his nature.
It seemed to him as if what she had done was something worse than ingratitude. She had taken their love, which was the expression of all that had been best and tenderest and most delicate in him, and had treated it as something evil and sinful. He had given her a pity, an understanding, a recognition, that went beyond anything those priests could give her; and now she was capable of this enthusiastic cry: “I owe them everything!”
The window of the room was wide open to the garden and there floated in upon them the distant murmur of Lexie’s and Nell’s voices and the musky scent of geraniums.
Rook found that he had counted much more upon Netta’s attitude to him than he had until that moment realized. It was not that he had anything to offer her; any reasonable alternative to this new life she had found for herself. If there had been anything definite in his mind he could have dealt with this blow more effectively, have found an antidote for its smart. He was standing before her there, pleading angrily and helplessly for something that had no shape, no substance, no form. He was pleading with her to have pity upon his life illusion, pity upon his soul’s inmost self, pity upon that ultimate reflection of himself before himself which lay in the abysmal mirror of his self-deception as the sky lies in a mirage of water above arid sands! He was pleading with her to save from destruction something that was so tenuous that he himself could hardly define it. Like a thin film of autumn mist his self-love wavered and undulated between them in that geranium-scented air. It became a drooping filament of unreal vapour. It faded; it hovered; it sank. A sense of intolerable emptiness came over him. Netta’s Fathers had saved her soul; but they had stricken his. But how could she know that? How could she know that his feeling for her was the one affair of his life that exactly lent itself to that morbid peculiarity in the depths of his being, his desire to love a person who in some way was dependent upon him, helpless before him, different from what he was by some impassable gulf?
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