Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  But it was a blubbered and ravaged countenance, emptied of all zest for life, robbed of its most characteristic folds and ceases, haggard and woebegone, like the knight-at-arms in “La Belle Dame,” that the younger brother—who would, except for this infant, have been the new Squire of Ashover– turned toward the dishes prepared for him by Mrs. Bellamy and toward the books and trees and flower beds and sunrises and sunsets of his accustomed life. He saw, not felt, how beautiful those halcyon days of October were. He went to and fro in a blank and hollow trance, a trance scooped out and scraped dry of all rich and joyous aplomb, of all pleasant chat, of all mellow and wanton sallies.

  When November came and Lady Ann’s child was more than a month old Lexie began slowly to regain something of his old humour. The curious thing about it was that his health, instead of suffering any collapse by Rook’s death, took a decided turn for the better. It was as if, by passing so suddenly into the dim underworld, the elder Ashover had transferred some actual psychic magnetism into the nerves of his companion. Their life together had been so intimate and so involved that it is easy to imagine the existence of a sort of common cistern of energy flowing between them; drawn upon by both of them; and deriving its source from the indestructible vitality of their ancestors! Such a reservoir would naturally flow with its own independent pulse; and the fact that there was only one of them left to draw upon it would double the influx of its power as soon as the first shock of separation had lost its violence.

  The first outward indication of this vita nuova in the sick man was the frequency of his visits to Toll-Pike Cottage where Netta was still staying on as Nell’s guest. More than once Nell came alone to share some meal with him in his own house; and by the time the first two weeks of November were over, there had been some very uncomfortable scenes with Mrs. Bellamy, who passionately resented these unconventional entertainments.

  In the middle of November there happened to fall upon Frome-side a long unaccountable spell of gusty westerly wind. It was a peculiar wind that thus came to that Dorset valley over the orchards and moors of Somersetshire. It was an intermittent wind, with wild spurts of incredibly thin rain, rain so fine and vapoury that it soaked to the core whatever it approached and made man and beast, and even the trees of the field, bend and bow and sway and crouch, when its chilly gusts swept over them and enveloped them.

  It was at the close of one of the worst of these persecuted days that Netta Page came to bid farewell to her buried friend.

  The rain had ceased with the fall of twilight, but not one flower upon the grave she came to greet had that persistent wind left intact. What disfigured wreaths did remain on the mound of disturbed loam were reduced to shapeless tangles of string and stalks.

  The wind kept blowing her hair loose from under her hat. It swept her cloak against her figure. It whirled round her in eddies and spirals. It blew leaves and twigs against her face and made it difficult for her to breathe as it beat furiously against her mouth and nostrils. She kept forming words in her throat; and it was to herself as if she uttered them. But whether any real sound would have come forth from her lips, even if this tempest had ceased, is more than doubtful.

  But she was talking to the shrouded form beneath her; and, coherent or incoherent, her words had their relief for her own soul….

  “You needn’t fret any more about him or her or me or any one! It’s all right, Rook dear. Everything is all right.”

  The force of the wind made her lift both hands to her rain-drenched hat; but even that movement did not prevent two long wisps of hair from detaching themselves from the rest and blowing like tattered streamers behind her. Hurriedly she sank down on her knees and pressed her face against the soaked clay.

  The descending darkness swept over her and covered her, separating her from the rest of the world.

  Over Antiger Woods, over Dorsal, over Battlefield, like some enormous arrow-stricken dying bird, that darkness came upon her; and though her mind was too absorbed in her grief to be conscious of anything external it is likely enough that the swallowing up of all shapes and contours and colours in the one great wave of blackness made it easier for her to feel that she and what lay down there beneath her were for that moment undivided.

  So dependent are the minds of human beings upon these outward tokens, so pitiably do they cling to the least vestige of any “real presence” of what they have loved, that the worst pang of loss that Netta was ever destined to know came when at last, stiff and shivering, she moved away from that spot.

  It is significant that these holes dug in churchyard clay are not refilled and covered up, so as to be left just level with the surrounding sod! For it is these tragic hillocks, themselves so nearly resembling enshrouded human shapes, that give us the last illusion of our sorrow, the idea that they actually wrap up and enfold that form which in reality lies so far below!

  Netta stumbled several times in the darkness over other graves, graves that were no more to; her mind than so many ridges of obstructing turf clods; but she reached the road at last; and when she did reach it and began to make her way with heavy dragging steps back to the cottage, though the storm of her grief had exhausted itself, what took its place was a cold, dull, inert recognition of that unbridgeable gulf between the living and the dead which the assuaging ritual of all the centuries leaves still exposed—yawning; gaping, uncrossed.

  She found the door of the cottage left open to admit her; but the fire was almost out in the little parlour and the house was empty.

  As she went to and fro among the deserted rooms, making weary and half-mechanical preparations for her own and her companion’s evening meal, she fancied she heard the sound of loud harsh music coming from the direction of the village. She opened the kitchen door and listened. Certainly there was something going on. Oh! This was the worst of it; that a human soul is not even allowed to live in quiet with its own loss. Life must be rushing, jerking, trailing, dancing, howling forward, just the same; and for ever deriding the least attempt to hold it back, to strike it into silence!

  “It sounds like a whirligig,” she thought as she closed the door. “I didn’t know they had whirligigs in the country.” When the meal was prepared and all was ready for Nell’s return she sat down listlessly on a chair in the kitchen, listening to that harsh music in the distance, to the purring of the Marquis of Carabas, to the ticking of the clock. Once she started, fancying she heard a sound on the floor above. She thought how queer it was that rooms where people had died should be endowed with more life than other rooms; and that the very boards should creak and the very soot fall dawn the chimney with a sort of intense and solemn self-consciousness!

  She wanted to concentrate her mind an a hundred little incidents of her life with Rook; but instead of being able to do this she was compelled, as if by an inner command, to listen intently to hear whether another board would creak up there in Hastings’s room….

  Netta was not the only one who had heard the strains of music that November evening. A couple of hours before, just after she had taken her hat and cloak and gone out into the twilight, the unexpected sound had reached the ears of her two friends as they sat together in the very place where she was sitting now.

  “Listen!” cried Lexie eagerly, leaping to his feet and running out into the back garden. The girl followed and he turned to her with an expression of childish delight. “It’s a roundabout!” he chuckled. “Who would have thought it possible as late in the year as this and on a night like this? I’ve known them to come in October on their way to London; but never in November!”

  He looked round him. It was nearly dark now; and, although the rain had stopped, the wind was moaning disconsolately in the trees above the wall and was tossing the bare stalks of the raspberry canes against the posts of the empty clothes line.

  It was one of those evenings in which foot travellers on country roads lean for a while over some wet stile or gate and survey the faint whitish glimmer in the sad west, and listen to the splash of
raindrops from some tall elm above their heads as a disturbed starling or pigeon tumbles out of

  “When was the last merry-go-round you saw, Nell?” he asked. And there was a tone in his voice as if he were deliberately defying the forlornness of earth and air and sky.

  “I’ve never seen one in Ashover, Lexie,” she answered.

  “Well, you shall see one!” he cried. “For I’ll show you one. I can take a girl to a circus of a cold November night as well as another!”

  “But, Lexie——” she began.

  He swept aside her objections. “Come!” he cried. “Get your things on! It’ll do us good to have a bit of sport.”

  He hurried her back into the house and made her put on her cape and hat, both of them composed of new mourning black, bought at a shop in Tollminster.

  As he held her cloak for her, she was struck by the manner in which the faded tweed suit he wore had grown by daily use to become a kind of animal’s skin. No human being’s clothes, seen without the wearer, could be more characteristic, more living, than Lexie Ashover’s! The effect was enhanced by the perpetual presence of some dead hedge weed or another left in his buttonhole as it might have been left on the shaft of a cart or at the bottom of a wicker basket.

  He put on a heavy muffler and overcoat and took his stick in his hand. This stick, a round-handled ash stick, was worn as smooth and glossy by long use as the carved pew of a monk or a hermit’s spade.

  Once out in the road they were aware that this stormy night had its own peculiar spirit, a spirit that had something reckless and magnetic in it, disturbing to human nerves. Neither the man nor the girl glanced back toward the white railings of Foulden Bridge, railings which had not yet been mended. Lexie kept talking and gesticulating; pointing with his hand in the direction from which the sound seemed to proceed; and laughing in his deep, chuckling, almost leonine manner over the strange fantasy of this belated showman in coming to such a place in the month of November.

  He led his companion at a quick pace, past the house of Mr. Pod, past the entrance to Marsh Alley, until he brought her to a small enclosed field on the north of the village where such entertainers were wont to encamp when they visited that district.

  The sound of the music increased in volume as they approached and was combined with spasmodic shrieks from the primitive engine that worked the roundabout, with the noisy shouts of young men, the laughter and giggling of girls, and the cries of children.

  The wind was still blowing so violently that the rough naphtha-lighted tent, in the midst of which the wooden horses gyrated, shook and shivered and tugged at its supports to such an alarming degree that the older villagers hesitated to enter for fear of having the whole thing come down about their ears.

  Lexie led Nell to the rear of a little crowd of wind-blown spectators who were standing at the entrance to the tent.

  “It’s late in the year, isn’t it, for this kind of thing?” he remarked to a sturdily built stranger who was bending over one of the tent pegs, making the rope more secure.

  “Late? I should think it was late,” replied the man in a surly tone. Then, when he took in the personality of Lexie: “We’re due in Bishop’s Forley to-night, sir,” he added, “and we stay there for the winter. I said myself ’twere a fool thing to stop here with the weather so had; but he would have it so; and so here we are!”

  “I’ve never known a merry-go-round in Ashover later than October,” repeated Lexie gravely, moving forward with Nell into the tent.

  The engine happened to stop at that moment, and as the boys and girls who had been riding clambered down, and another instalment prepared to mount, a quick whisper ran round among them and many eyes were turned upon the couple.

  Nell pulled him by the arm. “Let’s get away,” she whispered. “They’re noticing us.”

  But it chanced that a particularly grotesque piebald horse had stopped just in front of Lexie. This horse possessed an unscrupulous and world-embracing eye, an eye upon whose yellow-tinted orb the flame of the naphtha lamps shone luridly, giving it an almost Cyclopean look.

  “One minute!” the young man said. And leaving his companion standing there alone, white-faced and disconcerted, he climbed up with careful deliberation upon the animal’s back.

  The music soon recommenced; and the fantastic circle of horses and riders revolved once more, to a pandemonium of raucous sounds.

  “Looksee! Looksee!” cried one of the children. “There be Master Lexie, a-ride-a-cock-horsin’ same as we!”

  Nell, in her black dress and black hat, was the cynosure of many astonished eyes. She knew them all, but she carefully avoided meeting the glance of any one in particular. Na one in the tent was bold enough to address her; the older people moving discreetly away to the farther side of the engine, the children crowding up as near to her as they dared but only whispering to each other in low tones that were drowned in the noise of the brazen din.

  She herself stared helplessly at Lexie’s figure, in its frayed overcoat and blue muffler, appearing and disappearing with punctual regularity, like some sign of the Zodiac in a clock-work heaven.

  The piebald horse he rode lost most of its individual character in that whirling revolution; but Nell could still catch the staring voracity of its insatiable eye, an eye that remained fixed upon her with an expression that was neither sympathetic nor derisive; an expression of simple devouring interest.

  As to Lexie himself, his own lineaments were composed into a fixed and smiling mask of infantile complacence. One of his eyelids was lifted a little higher than the other in a kind of ecstasy of ironic roguery; but the glance he directed toward his companion as he passed her by in his gyrations had in it a sublime acceptance of destiny worthy of the animal on whose back he rode.

  The noise in the young man’s ears was deafening; and as he listened to it, giving himself up to the motion, his mind began wandering off to other sounds of a less artificial character that were at that moment rising up toward the cloud-covered sky from his native Frome-side.

  He thought of the way the branches were creaking even now among the Scotch firs on Heron’s Ridge. He imagined the grunt of a badger as it trotted in the moaning wind across Titty’s Ring. He heard the cattle stirring drowsily in their bartons. He heard the splash of a perch in Saunders’ Hole and the cry of a stray mallard drifting across the marshes toward Comber’s End. Out of the heart of that brazen clamour he seemed to be listening to the tiny German clock ticking the hour in his mother’s bedroom. He even fancied he could hear the quiet breathing in its guarded cradle of the small head of his House, the young new Squire of Ashover. And then suddenly, as in his fantasy he counted up these unnoticed sounds of the night, it seemed to him that he could actually catch the whirring of owl wings hovering about his elm tree in the churchyard, as they had done in the moonlight, just a year ago, when he met his brother at that place.

  Before the music stopped or the rotation of the wheel of horses and riders came to a standstill, Lexie jumped down on the ground by Nell’s side. He took her by the arm and led her out of the tent where they were met in the darkness by that familiar smell of an enclosure of grass trodden by men and beasts, the precise savour of which none know who have not been to fairs and circuses in country villages.

  “The hobbyhorse is forgot!” he muttered; and the girl was bewildered by the fierce intensity of his grip upon her arm. The wind seemed to blow against his face at that moment with an ice-cold menace, as of some breath from the outer spaces. He gathered his forces together to resist this threat; and instinctively, in so doing, he let his arm in the darkness enclose Nell’s waist.

  “Don’t let’s go back just yet,” he pleaded. “Netta won’t mind waiting a little for supper.”

  The girl was so startled and shocked by the change in his manner as they came out of the tent that, in her pity for him, she did not have the heart to resist. But the touch of her warm young body, as he pressed her against him, soon restored him.

  He l
ed her down a grassy rain-soaked lane; one of those lanes on the outskirts of a village that usually end in nothing more hospitable than some isolated group of cattle sheds or pigsties.

  What in this case they stumbled upon, however, was an open barn; and Lexie was enchanted beyond measure to detect in its cavernous obscurity a mass of sweet-smelling piled-up hay.

  But Nell hesitated now and drew back when, with an exclamation of unashamed delight, he pulled at her hand to lead her forward into this shrine of Demeter.

  “Let’s go home, Lexie,” she begged. “My shoes and stockings are soaking, and I’m sure yours must be! We really oughtn’t to keep Netta waiting any longer.”

  But it was not easy to resist the wistful and humorous appeals, some of them almost querulous in their childishness, with which he implored her; and she yielded at last.

  From outside in the darkness they could hear the shrieks and snorts of the merry-go-round and the wild music of a country jig that might have been the very tune to which the West Saxons first invaded Frome-side, so heathen and barbaric did it sound.

  Neither of them could have told how long they were there together, with that sweet penetrating smell of the hay about them, and the scent of the dark, rain-drenched fields blown in through the door. But when they stood at last on the threshold of their hiding place, and while Lexie’s countenance was illuminated for a moment by the light of the match with which he lit a cigarette, Nell noticed to her consternation a look upon his face like the look of a child outraged and lost.

  “What is it, Lexie?” she asked anxiously.

  But he threw the match away without answering. His mind, like a blind home-turning mole whose moving tunnel escapes all prevention, though its course can be traced by the upheaved turf, reverted to that six-foot-deep hole in the churchyard.

  “Come along,” he said brusquely; but a minute later, offering her his arm to lean upon, “I do hope you won’t be the worse for this, Nell. It would be a shame if you were; for you’re a brave and generous little girl. Do your feet feel very wet? If they don’t feel wet I expect you’ll get no harm.”