Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  Along with the emptiness that filled his soul there came the sting of a peculiarly masculine resentment; the resentment which arises when a woman with whom one has dropped one’s mask and put aside one’s reserve suddenly reassumes her mask and her reserve at the very moment when one is most unarmed and at her mercy!

  “And so your Fathers have taught you to look back upon our life together as sin?” His tone was strained and harsh; and the girl saw clearly that he was on the verge of breaking out into a torrent of indignant words, bitter, corrosive, capable of leaving behind them scars that would never be effaced.

  She must stop him. She must explain to him. She must make him realize what she had been feeling when she deliberately began drinking in order to degrade herself in his eyes. It was intolerable to her that he should take her present mood, her new life, and make of it something that diminished the value of all that had been between them. What she wanted to make him understand was that never from her—never, never from her!—could come any diminishing, any undervaluing of their love or of all that that love had meant. And if she could not make him see this without saying what was too hard to say, well, she must say it!

  Woman-like, what hurt her most was that she should have blurred the image of herself that their love had created in his mind, nay, spoilt his response to that image by giving him the idea that it was possible for her to have changed so much as to be ready to betray their past together, to blaspheme against what they had shared.

  She looked at him with that expressive look with which one human being beats at the closed shutters of another’s conciousness, like a starving traveller whose language is so remote, so foreign, that it might be mistaken for the wind in the trees, for the rain on the porch! What she wanted to lay before him was nothing less than the full measure of her love. That he should accuse her of not recognizing the worth of their days together or the value of the sympathy he had given her—it was blind, unfair, distorted, mad!

  That was what men were always doing in this world; they were laying stress on external, outward, logical aspects of relations between people and missing the one thing needful! They were always working themselves up into rational indignation about aspects of love that were accidental, occasional, relative; whereas, all the while, Love Himself, absolute and immeasurable, remained dumb and inarticulate on the threshold!

  As she looked at him now with this mystery lying unspoken, unspeakable, at the heart of her existence, and that turmoil of wild accusation trembling upon his tongue, it came over her what a tragic chasm it was that separated the love of a woman from the love of a man.

  “It is thus. It is so. There are these evidences. There is this proof,” cries the exacting reason of the one. “I love you! Can’t you see that I love you?” answers the blind instinct of the other. Netta began to feel heart-sick and dizzy as she watched him, standing there like a judge; waiting, waiting, till some self-betraying murmur on her part brought down on her head the already formulated sentence. She seemed to herself to be beating back with her hands a clamour of discordant voices, of confused inexplicable sounds. Why did those steps keep marching up and down, up and down, in the room above? Or were they, too, only the beating of her heart? Surely that must be Lexie and Nell just outside the door! But their murmurings reached her as if they were not human at all; as if Rook’s pulses full of unjust anger had acquired some horrid goblin speech and were rushing upon her like an infuriated mob—

  And then, without any reason for it, she saw with incredible clearness a little thin gold ring that the “Father” had worn on his finger when she was first pouring out to him the misery of her shame, of her loneliness; and as that vision disappeared, mingling strangely with a fierce red spot on Rook’s lowering forehead, she found herself experiencing that lightning-rapid panorama of her whole previous existence, such as, people had told her, persons underwent when, in drowning, they sank for the third time.

  She certainly had begun to feel actually faint. What was Rook doing standing there, so funnily stern, in front of her? What was it she had to make him understand? Something that a person could do when he loved another person very much—but something that it was impossible to speak of!

  “Rook!” she brought out with a kind of gasp.

  At that moment the door flew open and Lexie and Nell precipitated themselves into the room. They both showed signs of extreme agitation and they both began speaking at once.

  “Pandie is out there——”

  “Pandie has come to say that——”

  Rook turned pale. Had the moment arrived? Was he even now the father of an heir to Ashover?

  Netta rose to her feet, also very white and trembling.

  “Is it Lady Ann?” she asked.

  Lexie was the one to explain; for Nell’s attention was distracted at that moment by the sound of her husband’s steps moving backward and forward in his room above.

  “Pandie is at the gate,” said Lexie hurriedly. “She says your wife can’t be found.”

  The first feeling that Rook had under the shock of this unexpected news was—strangely enough—a queer spasm of relief! For some profound subconscious reason anything seemed more tolerable to him just then than to hear that his child had come into the world.

  “Can’t be found?” he repeated. And then, taking advantage of the strangeness of the communication to give vent to his unnatural emotion in the form of blind anger against the messenger: “What does the little fool come running here for?” he cried sternly. “Why doesn’t she look about in the garden, in the kitchen garden, in the orchard, up Battlefield, even? Ann has been walking quite far some of these days. She’s taken into her head to go a farther stroll than usual, that’s all! What’s the use of coming here to tell us a thing like that? Let me see her.” And he made a step toward the open door, where Nell was still standing, nervously preoccupied by the sounds overhead. “Let me see her! Let me talk to her!”

  But Lexie intervened and stopped him. “It’s more serious than you think, Rook,” he said gravely. “For God’s sake keep your wits about you! They’ve searched the garden and the orchard already. Pandie says they’ve been everywhere. Mother has been herself to the top of Heron’s Ridge looking for her. God knows what may not have happened! Women are apt to go crazy at these times and do the maddest things. Pandie says old Betsy Cooper has turned up, dragging the idiot Binnory after her, with some wild story about having seen her in Antiger Lane near Drool’s cottage. Martha Vabbin has gone to get Drool himself; and to see if by some lucky chance she just went in there to rest. But from what Betsy and the idiot say she didn’t go into the cottage at all——” He broke off suddenly, disturbed by the sight of Nell rushing wildly up the stairs.

  “There’s something wrong up there, too,” he added, with a shrug of his shoulders.

  Rook without a word hurried into the garden. He found Pandie standing on the gravel path like a comic image of desperation, her head bare and her hand clutching an enormous garden rake.

  “Oh, Master Rook, Master Rook! What have come upon our heads to-day?” cried the distracted servant. “Missus says I was to fetch ’ee to come home at once; and Mr. Lexie, too, if he were well enough to walk on his feet. And she says you was to fetch Mr. Twiney and Mr. Pod up along! And she says you was to summon the police; and I reckon myself ’twould be only right, considering how them gippoos be abroad, to send to Forley Barracks for the Military. Lord alive! Lord alive! That I should be the woman to tell the Squire of Ashover that his lady be gone to find a hole in the river deep enough to commit ’fanticide in!”

  Rook was too bewildered by this time even to smile at these aberrations of the native of Somersetshire.

  “What have you got that rake for, Pandie?” he asked.

  “For to drag the ponds and ditches with, Master Rook! They say that when a body’s expecting, like as your lady be, there ain’t no pond water near or far that Providence don’t tempt ’un with. ’Tis a pity her legs bain’t swelled up! When their legs
be swelled up they can’t go suiciding and such-like. ’Tis a dispensation of Nature!”

  Rook turned away from her.

  “Lexie! Nell! Netta!” he called out. “I’m off to the house!”

  He strode to the gate. “You go on to the village, Pandie,” he cried, “and get Twiney and Pod and bring them back with you in Twiney’s cart and don’t go shouting all this nonsense to everyone you meet. I expect I shall find Lady Ann safe at home when I get back!”

  He was already in the road when he heard his brother’s voice calling him by name. He turned and met Lexie at the gate.

  “Nell has just come down from talking to that beggar upstairs,” said the younger man, “and she says she’s had the greatest difficulty in quieting him. I couldn’t get the drift of what the trouble was; but he’s got his confounded book mixed up with your child. The chap seems to have gone all to pieces. I’m glad Netta is with them. Nell oughtn’t to be left alone with him.” He laid his hand on his brother’s arm. “You’re not letting this fuss about Ann upset you, Rook, are you? This day seems dedicated to one agitation after another! But don’t you worry, dear Rook. Ann’s probably turned up by now.”

  Rook suddenly bent forward, took his brother’s grave and anxious countenance between his hands and kissed him rapidly. “I shall look in at the church,” he said. “That’s just the place none of them would think of! But, as you say, she’s probably safe back in her room by now. There’s something about this day that seems to make everyone nervous. I’ve noticed it before. Whenever the wind drops dead in Ashover and the air is absolutely still, something’s sure to happen with us. We’re a funny family. The gods must be perfectly sick of us. Well, I’m off! Don’t leave Nell alone with Hastings, I beg you, Lexie!”

  He strode off down the road.

  Lexie saw Pandie staring up at Hastings’s window as if she had been mesmerized. With one hand on her rake she was mechanically moving it about among the geraniums. Whether in that waking dream she imagined she was dredging a pond to find Ann’s body or whether she was reverting to some childish memory of helping her father amid the rich loam of Sedgemoor, no one will ever know. There are instinctive actions and gestures of human beings, especially at some great crisis of drastic events such as was then gathering about these people, which will always retain an element of the grotesque and the inexplicable.

  “I’ll come with you to the village, Pandie,” said the young man, breaking in upon her trance. “Here! For God’s sake drop that rake of yours and pull yourself together! What’s the matter with you, woman?”

  The red-haired servant turned toward him a face that was distorted with emotion.

  “She told I we be all flummoxed by thik parson up there.”

  “Who told you?” cried Lexie impatiently; and then, catching sight of Netta at the door, “Don’t you leave Nell alone with that chap, will you? Pandie and I are going to the village.”

  Netta made a sign that she understood him and returned into the house. Lexie took the rake from Pandie’s unconscious hands and led her into the road.

  “Who told you?” he repeated as they moved off together.

  “That gippoo bitch, Bet Cooper, ’twere what warned I of ’ee. ’Twas for that she be come, so ’a did say. She’d a-seen thik parson murdering our Squire, or summat o’ that, in a girt wold crystal-stone, what she have stoled from some foreign scollard! I did tell thee mother what she did say; but not a thought would she give to it. Your mother’s not one to attend to God his wone self when she be put about.”

  Lexie found his strength barely sufficient to reach the first house in the village, which by good luck happened to be that of Mr. Pod, the Sexton. Here he decided to rest, sending Pandie on to find Mr. Twiney.

  Sitting in Mr. Pod’s little kitchen through which not a breath of air passed, either by door or window, he could not help recalling his brother’s words about these days when the wind was dead in Ashover.

  “I don’t like it,” he said to himself. “I don’t like it! Things are beginning to get out of control; and I can’t tell what the upshot will be.”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THE inviolable stillness of that last day of September prevented Lady Ann from enjoying her usual rest in the afternoon. An unaccountable malaise came upon her, a sense of suffocation, of being shut in, imprisoned, sepulchred, buried alive. She had suffered from the same species of nervousness once or twice before, but never so badly as now.

  She went to the window of her room and looked out.

  Everything was hushed and death-still in the somnolent garden. The branches of the great cedar swam motionless upon the air and seemed borne up by vibrant aërial waves of soft blue mist.

  “I’ll go for a walk,” she said to herself. “I’ll take Lion.”

  She put on her prettiest summer hat, threw a thin loose dust-coloured cloak round her shoulders and slipped quietly down the stairs. Very cautiously, so as not to arouse any one’s attention, she let herself out of the front door and walked round to the rear of the house.

  She knew that Rook was out with Lexie somewhere and she knew that Mrs. Ashover was resting in her big upstairs room. As she came past the kitchen door she was met by that peculiar complicated odour which in English houses of the Ashover sort seems synonymous with two o’clock in the afternoon, might indeed be the very smell of the gamboge-coloured hide of two o’clock, that enemy of romance and all delicate joy! It was an odour in which the “washing-up” beginning in the scullery mingled with the servants’ dinner ending in the kitchen and both of these with the indescribable sense of the crowding together of the various house pets, canine and feline, who had “followed the dishes out.”

  Lady Ann had not been able to eat much lunch and this two-o’clock smell made her feel for a moment a little dizzy and sick. But the great point was that nobody about the place saw her as she hurried past. Lion was neither at the kitchen door nor in his kennel by the stable. “Oh, I forgot!” she said to herself. “I told them to take him down to Drool’s.” She had vexed herself lately about the dog; feeling that, now her own walks were curtailed, it didn’t get enough exercise, Rook being teased rather than entertained by the animal’s company.

  Her momentary malaise passed off after she had crossed the orchard and got clear away on the slope of Battlefield, and when she reached the top of Heron’s Ridge she felt better than she had felt for several weeks.

  She felt happier, too. That rich, indolent, windless autumn day was profoundly adapted to her mood. The sense of the apples and pears growing riper and mellower every day among those lichen-covered branches, of the hazelnuts growing browner and plumper among their crumpled leaves, of the mushrooms in the lush grass meadows appearing so suddenly and so quickly, that even those who knew their privileged haunts would wonder at their coming; the sense of all these things around and about her seemed to soothe her mind and liberate her spirit, as if the immense fecundity of Nature were something she could draw upon to enlarge and replenish her own vitality.

  She had not been as far as Drool’s cottage for several weeks; but to-day it seemed to her that it would be very nice to pay a visit to the place. She felt a queer emotional craving to stand once more, whatever might be the result of what she had soon to go through, in that little room of Binnory’s. And besides, she would greatly love to catch a final glimpse of the dog, her one completely faithful and loyal supporter, before she entered upon this life-and-death struggle.

  There were many feelings in her proud young heart that she had always found it easier to confide to horses and dogs than to her own species; and with Lion especially she had come to find a satisfying sense of dropping her reserve and giving way to this or that primitive and even savage emotion such as her stoical training had taught her to suppress in the presence of her own race.

  She came down the Dorsal side of the hill with a gayer and more light-hearted tread than she had used for many a long day in her diurnal strolls. She watched the rabbits with the eye of a sportsman
, at once sympathetic and predatory. She snuffed the air, at one big clump of bracken, catching the familiar taint of a fox in that misty windless atmosphere; and she stopped more than once to place her foot on the loose up-flung trail of earth mould which marked the movement of a burrowing mole. A few of her husband’s black namesake birds kept up a perpetual clamour above the high tops of the trees as if to make sure that no invading jay or magpie should interfere with the return of their tribe when later in the afternoon they “made wing to the rooky wood,” while the whirring headlong flight of more than one family of partridges made her forget her obligation to her own offspring!

  It was only when she was quite close to the cottage at the foot of the hill that her mood veered. It was as if the master of the vessel of her mind had suddenly come on deck and given orders to swing sheer round, from larboard to starboard. It was a quick instinctive rush of anger against Rook that decided her.

  “I’ll turn round and go straight back,” she thought. “That room is nothing to me now; and Lion will only want to go home with me if he sees me.”

  She was so close to the gap in the hedge, however, by which the lane was reached, a little to the right of the cottage, that she was led on, by that curious and childish instinct which demands that the most drifting of human walks should have some sort of goal, to struggle cautiously down the bank to the familiar road.