Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  Once more that jingle of Betsy’s—“Till book be burned no child’ll be borned”—sounded in her brain with the appalling distinctness of a warning sea bell rocked by rising waves.

  Nell was keeping up, in a kind of crooning tone, a sort of lullaby to the man on the bed. She seemed to forget the presence of the others.

  Suddenly Hastings bent forward, stretched out his arm, and possessed himself of the volume on the desk. He turned over some of its pages with a sort of malignant awe; while a moment later with a glance at Lady Ann that had a flicker of demonic subtlety in it, he tossed the book down at the foot of the bed.

  Then it seemed as if he forgot its existence; for he began to talk incoherently of certain early memories of his in the slums of London. He mentioned names that were completely strange to them all; and with those names he mixed the names of Latin writers and the titles of Latin books. And he talked of the lily pond in Kew Gardens, which must have been the. objective of some thrilling childish excursion. And then he muttered something about park railings, with deer behind them. “Let me feed them, Mother! Let me feed them!” he cried out in a loud voice; and then, without any apparent connection, he began reciting the old grammar-school tag:

  “Common are to either sex

  Artifex and oppifex,

  Conviva, vates, advena,

  Testis, civis, incola,

  Parens, sacerdos, custos, vindex,

  Adolescens, infans, index,

  Judex, haeres, comes, dux,

  Princeps, municeps, conjux!”

  Mr. Pod manifested considerable apprehension when he heard these strange syllables. He looked from one to another of the three ladies as if he expected them to call upon him to clap his great hand over the mouth of the delirious man.

  “This do come of praying and preaching,” he whispered in an awestruck voice. “Parson be calling upon the Lord in Greek and Hebrew, same as ’tis writ the Blessed Saviour did. ’Tis enough to make a man’s wits turn to have to say ‘Dearly Beloved’ and ‘Scripture moveth us in sundry places’ every seventh day, wet or fine! ’Tis a wonder more on ’em don’t start hollerin’ and forgetting theyselves!”

  Lady Ann heard these words of the sexton with the sort of attention a starving man on a raft might give to the screaming of a sea gull while his companions were casting lots as to which of them should die first.

  The sight of that volume lying at the foot of the bed obsessed her with an irresistible fascination. Suddenly she could endure it no longer; and, without a word said, she just slipped forward a couple of steps, snatched up the volume, thrust it under her arm beneath her cloak and moved quickly back to the open door.

  The voice of the delirious man went on mumbling inanely the classic doggerel:

  “Auctor, exsul, and with these

  Bos … tigris … interpres …

  Canis and anguis … serpens … sus.”

  It was as though, having completed his categorical Domesday Book of all life’s progeny, he were waiting in sardonic expectation for the explosion of his train of dynamite.

  Nell and Netta both made instinctive movements toward her. There was something treacherous and outrageous to their minds in this arbitrary despoiling of an unconscious man.

  “What are you doing, Lady Ann?” cried Netta. “You’re not going to take his book really away, are you?”

  “Give it back…. Give it back…. Oh, how dare you?” protested Nell.

  There was, however, at that moment such a dangerous light in the eyes of the girl in the doorway that neither of them had the courage to approach her. In any case, so tightly was she holding the book, it could not have been taken from her without a struggle; and the idea of anything of that sort, in the condition in which she was and under the eyes of Hastings, was inconceivable.

  “Take it and good luck to ’ee, marm,” threw in Mr. Pod. “And if ’ee do bury it, same as parson did tell ’ee to, me own girt pick what I do use in hard weather be lying under one of they stone seats in porch. I reckon ’twere a good deed if more of them books be put under sod! ’Tis this book-writing what do worrit quiet-lived folks more’n the worst god-danged ale in Dorchester!”

  “You’re not too … too tired … to walk home … Lady Ann … are you?” murmured Netta. “Because … I could go and get someone——” She stopped abruptly in the presence of the cold stare which the girl gave her from the door; but she added gallantly, “We are all so thankful to see that you’re safe.”

  Ann replied to this only with a general and easy “Good-night,” and descending the stairs with the air of one who has paid a natural and normal visit let herself out into the garden.

  A quarter of an hour later and Hastings’s mood had changed again for the worse. The unfortunate man seemed to forget that he himself had wished to give his “Praise of Death” into the arms of a pregnant woman. He began to renew his efforts to break loose from Mr. Pod’s restraining hands. So distressing was it to Nell to see his struggles that she enquired of Netta in a low voice whether it wouldn’t be better to humour him and let him get out into the air.

  “There would be no harm as long as we all went with him‚” she whispered.

  But Netta opposed this suggestion with stern common sense.

  “Nell, it’s impossible,” she retorted. “It’s impossible. He’ll be quieter presently. But if he isn’t you’d better go to the village and get more help.”

  The girl’s words were soon justified. Exhausted by his own violence the unhappy philosopher fell at last into a sort of comatose quiescence; and though, as the evening wore on, their hope that he would fall asleep was not fulfilled, there seemed no likelihood that he would make any further attempt that night to get out of the house.

  He refused, however, to let Nell undress him; and she had to content herself with seeing him lying, pale and silent, his eyes fixed on the darkening window; while Mr. Pod, seated on a chair by his side, watched over him with respectful patience.

  The twilight of that last day of September seemed loth to lose itself in the finality of night. All the various familiar sounds which that particular hour seems to evoke upon a country road—the lowing of cattle, the crying of nocturnal birds, the intermittent barking of a farmyard dog or of a fox in the furze covers—followed on her journey home the solitary figure of Lady Ann, with that closely written volume held tightly under her cloak.

  As she walked slowly between the darkening water meadows and the misty stubble fields she became aware, more acutely than was usual with her, of the phantasmal quality of an autumn evening of this kind. The remote fluidity, as if they were being looked at through the windows of a sea king’s palace, of the trees and gates and weir dams which she passed struck her with a sense of beauty that she had never in that particular way experienced before.

  She had a queer, vague impression that she was feeling these things not only for herself but for the child within her; and, as this feeling grew upon her, a deep mysterious gratitude to life itself; not to any power beyond life—for she was a woman almost completely devoid of the religious sense—but just to life, life as it was, with everything that it entailed, rose up in her heart so overpoweringly that she actually hummed to herself as she walked along.

  She felt chilly, however, as she crossed the wooden bridge and inhaled the mud-scented mist that rose from its surface; and once more that oracular jingle came into her head. “It’s all nonsense,” she thought, “to imagine that those Deformities I saw by the caravan that day uttered a thing like that! Betsy Cooper must have invented it herself. It’s the sort of abracadabra she would think of; especially after listening to that fool of a parson. I sha’n’t say a word of this to Rook or any one!”

  By this time she did begin to feel the effects of her long walk; but she was a girl of immense intrepidity and she struggled on gallantly until, crossing the stone bridge by the churchyard, she found herself at her own drive gate.

  As it happened there was a pile of burning weeds just outside this gate,
one of the growing evidences of Rook’s absentminded submission to the indolence and carelessness of his dependents. She was still thinking of that “Till-book-be-burned” catch of the pseudo-gipsy when her eyes fell upon the great red heart of this smoking heap, glowing with a crimson glow in the damp windless obscurity.

  Once more acting on a sudden unpremeditated impulse she removed the volume from beneath her cloak and flung it into the centre of the smouldering heap.

  Having done the thing, it was with a fierce and primitive satisfaction that she prodded its pages open with the end of her parasol and watched the ruddy flames leap up and devour them. So bright were these flames as the pages really began shrivelling that she could actually catch a word or two in Hastings’s meticulously clear hand, as they were thus illuminated in their vanishing. She caught the word “nothingness” and the word “equilibrium” and some other word that might have been “dissolution” or “devolution”; and then there were no more intelligible pages left of the life work of the Reverend William Hastings!

  She was interested, however, to observe that before falling into dust the last of these pages remained as thin blackened ghosts within the licking tongues of the fire; ghosts of written sheets, upon which she still could trace unreadable hieroglyphs and indecipherable signs; signs that were the bodiless revenants of those irrefutable arguments with which the theologian had demolished the universe that begat him, hieroglyphs that were like long-necked cormorants flying over a gulf into which Time and Space had sunk.

  She left the heap of burning weeds and moved slowly, very slowly, toward the house. She began to be aware that the exhaustion, which made her body feel like something that was made of pulseless wool but at the same time was as heavy as sods of turf, was now accompanied by other, more disturbing symptoms.

  Lady Ann bit her lip and stood for a moment quite still. Then, moving on steadily and quietly across the lawn, she mounted the familiar steps of the entrance to the house and opened the door into the hall.

  Here she swayed and staggered; and finally fell half-fainting into one of the great mahogany hall chairs inscribed with the armorial bearings of the House of Ashover!

  CHAPTER XXV

  BY GOOD fortune Mr. Twiney and his gig were both in the Ashover stable, when on Lady Ann’s recovery from her collapse it became plain that her confinement was at hand. The man was despatched at once to fetch Doctor Twickenham, whose house was some three miles away, on the Tollminster Road.

  It was Mrs. Ashover herself who discovered the girl, white and foredone, on that hard mahogany chair in the panelled hall. The old lady displayed as much energy in this crisis as she had done on previous agitating occasions; and it was not long before, with Rook’s help, she had got the girl safely undressed and in bed, in the pleasant room she had used since her arrival on the scene more than a year ago.

  Left alone at last with his wife, whose sufferings were at present very intermittent, Rook found himself quite differently affected and much more affected than he had anticipated. He was a man to whom the immediate presence of physical distress was more impressive than any mental or emotional appeal. Something peculiarly responsive and sensitive in him was stirred and troubled as he watched those quick spasms crossing the girl’s flushed face.

  “Ann,” he muttered as he bent down over her. “Ann, my sweet Ann!”

  She smiled at him stoically, but he could not help noticing that there was a remoteness and detachment at the back of her eyes, as if she were a duellist with drawn rapier saluting her opponent while she spoke lightly and casually to the friend at her side.

  “You will get through it all right, Ann? You feel you’ll be all right?”

  It seemed natural enough to her that she should be the one to supply comfort at that moment rather than to receive it.

  “Of course I’ll get through it, Rook,” she said. “Don’t you fret yourself about me. Go for a walk and keep safe away till it’s all over. And don’t let your mother or any one else worry you about me. I shall be all right.”

  She clenched her fingers tightly as a recurrent spasm overtook her; but as soon as it passed she smiled at him again.

  “He’ll be born on the first of October,” she said confidently.

  There was a moment’s silence between them while he wondered whether it would annoy her, or whether she would think it an unreal and sentimental thing to do, if he took hold of one of her hands.

  To his utter astonishment she suddenly plucked both her arms out from beneath the sheet and flung them round his neck.

  “Kiss me, Rook,” she sobbed. “I love you! I do love you so much!”

  He bent down; and for the first time in the lives of these two proud creatures there were salt tears mingled with the embrace they exchanged.

  A hurried knock at the door made the man rise up erect and composed.

  “Open it, dear,” she gasped; and with a smile more obviously strained than any she had yet given him, “and go for a good long walk—but not too long!”

  He opened the door and there stood his mother. The little lady had the demeanour of some military conqueror in an old print who stands amid dying men and horses with the complacency of a successful horticulturist.

  “We mustn’t exhaust her by talking,” she said; and Rook felt inclined to take the triumphant old woman by the shoulders and shake her violently, while he bawled in her ears: “It’s wicked! It’s wicked! It’s wrong! It’s wrong! It’s wrong!” What he did say was: “I’m going out for a while, Mother. Twickenham will be here in a moment.”

  “But—Rook”—and Mrs. Ashover showed signs of puzzled irritation—“she may ask for you presently. She may want you. They often feel like that!”

  He pushed past her without replying and ran downstairs.

  His overcoat lay on the hall table and he pulled it on, shivering. For some reason he felt at that moment deadly cold. As he did this Pandie came running out of the kitchen.

  “Master Rook! How be my Lady? Be it really begun, then? ’Tis best for all when’t do come quick and fast. Missus said I were to bide in kitchen and not come nigh to she; but ’tis terrible hard to stand afore thik old sink and act natural-like when my Lady be brought to bed. Martha, she do say ’tis the Lord wi’ healing in His wings what us best to pray to; but I says, and they was my very words, Master Rook, I says, I’ll just run out and ask Squire hisself. Maybe he’ll say ’tis tempting of Providence for I to bide in kitchen! Maybe he’ll say ’twere best for she and best for the blessed babe that I bide upstairs near thik door so’s to be ready and waiting. Martha can open for doctor. She be one who can act natural when all be topsy-turvied! But I weren’t born holy and hushed. I were born trembly and human-hearted. So don’t ’ee tell I to bide in kitchen, Master Rook, when my Lady be brought to bed. ’Tisn’t in nature that I should do the like o’ that, whatever Missus do say!”

  Rook hardly caught the drift of this torrent of speech, but a sickening pity came over him for that lonely figure in the room upstairs; and at the same time the feeling deepened upon him that he must get away—away—away.

  He moved to the door; but the red-haired servant in her excitement clung to his coat sleeve.

  “Thee aren’t going out, Master, be ’ee? Oh, don’t ’ee go out, Master, don’t ’ee go out! I’ve a-heard four girt thunderclaps already as I were trying to scrape thik old silver coffee-pot what thee mother must have clean though sky do fall! Don’t ’ee go out, Squire Ash’ver, don’t ’ee go out, Master Rook! Doctor’ll be here present; and ’tisn’t in nature for ’ee to go!”

  He flung her off and rushed bareheaded into the garden, slamming the great Georgian door behind him. It was with an indescribable feeling of relief, when he found himself outside the drive gate and in the road, that he felt heavy splashes of rain upon his face.

  There was no sound of thunder; and indeed it may well have been that those four thunderclaps had no existence except in Pandie’s head, but before he had gone many steps a torrential volume o
f rain descended upon him.

  It was like the breaking of some vast taut hawser by which the very planetary ship itself was roped to its cosmic dock; so that the earth vessel now, free of all restraint, unpiloted, masterless, lampless, drifted, with all its dark, wet, silent decks and rigging, into a chaos of water, wherein the waters “that are above the firmament” mingled with the waters “that are beneath the firmament!”

  When Rook reached the middle of the stone bridge he turned round, hearing the sound of wheels. Very faintly, like two watery marsh fires, phosphorescent and fitful, he could see the lights of Twiney’s cart as it stopped at the drive gate. So the mare had been persuaded, somehow, in spite of this waterspout of rain, to pass the “Gorm” signpost; and the doctor had come to Ashover House, for the first time, for this purpose, since he came to assist at the birth of Lexie!

  Rook leaned upon the cold parapet of the bridge from the surface of which the rain splashed into the darkness. As he stared down into the murmuring obscurity beneath him he remembered how the river had looked on that moonlit night when Lexie came over from Marsh Alley to meet him in the churchyard. That was the first time his brother had told him about his desire to be buried underneath the elm.

  He clutched the cold edge of the stonework with both his hands and bent forward, listening to the gurgling noises made by the flowing water and to the hissing sound of the rain as it struck the river’s surface.

  The rain beat down upon his bare head with a force that made him wonder if it were not going to change to hail. But it was much too warm a night for that; and he recognized that it was the unusual size of the individual raindrops and the torrential force with which their massed volume hit his skull, which gave him that particular impression.