Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  JOHN COWPER POWYS

  DUCDAME

  DEDICATED

  TO

  THAT SUPERIOR MAN

  KWANG-TSE OF KHI-YUAN

  THE ONLY ONE AMONG PHILOSOPHERS TO BE AT ONCE RESPECTFUL TO HIS SPIRIT-LIKE ANCESTORS AND INDULGENT TO THOSE WHO, LIKE THE PROTAGONIST OF THIS BOOK,

  GO WHERE THEY ARE PUSHED,

  FOLLOW WHERE THEY ARE LED,

  LIKE A WHIRING WIND,

  LIKE A FEATHER TOSSED ABOUT,

  LIKE A REVOLVING GRINDSTONE.

  AMI. What’s that “ducdame?”

  JAQ. ’Tis a Greek invocation, to call fools into a circle….

  ACT II, Scene VI, As You Like It.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  About the Author

  Copyright

  DUCDAME

  DUCDAME

  CHAPTER I

  SOME of the most significant encounters in the world occur between two persons one of whom is asleep or dead; and it might almost seem as if Rook Ashover had recognized this fact when he found himself standing by Netta Page’s side on the night of November’s fullest moon. Netta herself, before they went to bed, had drawn the curtain back and pulled up the blind; and she was now lying with her face illuminated and her soul, as it were, exposed. Rook looked at her with fixed intensity‚ as if he were striving to solve some long-withheld riddle; some riddle to which a night of this kind could alone bring the solution.

  The effect of the moonlight on Netta’s face was interesting. It was even complicated. It emphasized a certain haggardness, a certain battered, woebegone pitifulness in her; but it also endowed her with a touching and patient dignity.

  She had never been beautiful; never even pretty; but as she lay now, with the breath coming evenly through her scarcely parted lips, there was something about her that would have arrested and held the attention of almost any onlooker.

  It was perhaps an enduring softness that predominated in that immobile pose; a softness bruised, relaxed, passive; yet resistant, too, and singularly undefeated for all its helplessness. Rook Ashover continued to gaze at her face as it lay thus prostrate before him, unashamed in its unconscious exposure; but his eyes very soon fell to forgetting what he actually saw in the abstraction of his thought.

  While he stood there, ready dressed to go out‚ the hands of the clock behind him pointing at two o’clock‚ he had the air of an intruder‚ almost of a stranger. When his thoughts did finally return to the figure in the bed‚ it was with a cold‚ remote, detached tenderness; the sort of tenderness that human beings feel in the presence of impersonal humanity.

  It was a movement from Netta herself that broke the spell at last. She turned uneasily‚ as if conscious of his scrutiny‚ and the expression of her profile pressed against the pillow was less placid than it had been before.

  Her movement made Rook vividly aware of the nature of his feelings; and a quick sudden anger against himself rose in his mind. What a fate it was to be made just as he was made‚ with this inhuman detachment always ready to fall upon him at every turn like a screen of coldly dripping gray-green water!

  He left the bedside and walked to the window. The great “branch-charmèd” trees stood out there above the grass‚ motionless and hushed. The empty white road, the bridge over the river, the wide water meadows beyond the river, all lay before him transformed‚ etherealized. The liquid luminosity that filled the air seemed to emanate from something remoter and more mysterious than that round silvery disc floating in the high zenith.

  Everything seemed insubstantial and dream-like. Shapes and shadows! Shadows and shapes! All the familiar things were distinct enough in that diffused pallor. But they seemed to him withdrawn, remote, intangible; as if he were regarding them from some solitary tower.

  Rook Ashover stared across the fields as he had stared a moment before at the face of the woman.

  The cold unearthliness of what he now saw found its response in what was occurring in his own mind‚ a response that went far to obliterate his self-contempt.

  Out over those moonlit fields his spirit wandered, out over the very brim, as it seemed, of our floating earth globe, thus rendered transparent and unsolid, out over the vast aërial gulfs beyond.

  Between his soul and all this enchanted spaciousness there arose a reciprocity he could not analyze, a feeling that had the irresponsibility of despair and yet was not despair, that resembled loneliness and yet was not loneliness. It was almost as if, just behind all this etherealized chemistry, there really did exist something corresponding to the old Platonic idea of a universe composed of mind-stuff, of mind-forms‚ rarer and more beautiful than the visible world.

  He left the window and stepping back to the bedside bent with exquisite precaution over the sleeper, touched her up-flung arm very gently with his lips; and then, opening and shutting the door as noiselessly as he could, ran hurriedly down the stairs and let himself out of the house.

  Certain portions of the earth’s surface seem, from the remotest past, to have responded in some particularly intense way to the influence of moonlight.

  Among these predestined localities the strip of road and river and meadowland surrounding Ashover Bridge was one of the most susceptible of all planetary spots to the lunar sorcery.

  This double-arched bridge, built of rough local stone, carries one of Dorsetshire’s most traditional highways over the river Frome‚ at the point where Ashover Church on the one bank, and Ashover House on the other bank, give the place its historic significance. The bridge represents, for those who are travelling southward, the near approach of the parting of the ways between Tollminster and Bishop’s Forley; but the milestone against the ditch opposite Rook Ashover’s gate informs the traveller of the distance to London itself.

  It was at this milestone that Rook glanced now.

  London? The word had almost ceased to have any significance to him; though from his childhood it had touched that riverside road with a curious magic.

  Arrived at the bridge he walked to the centre of it and leaned over the parapet.

  It was hand not to feel as though this familiar stonework were strange and insubstantial under the indrawn breath of that immense silence.

  The water itself as it swirled and eddied under the arches seemed to flow with a muted movement‚ as if it were not real water but phantom water.

  It grew real enough, however, even as he watched it; for a great perch, at the bottom of what they called Saunders’ Hole, rose suddenly to the surface with a splash that made Rook start.

  To that big fish, too, it must have seemed as if there were more in this November night than a mere ordinary lapse of hours and moments.

  Down to the depths of Saunders’ Hole it sank again; and there, where the man’s glance could not follow it, it moved rapidly to and fro as if under some lunar ecstasy; sometimes with great open mouth and huge iridescent gills turned upstream it lashed the water; sometimes with its sharp spine fins erect and its tail qui
vering it dug furiously at the river bed.

  Leaning his elbows against the parapet Rook let his gaze wander from point to point of that well-known landscape. It was the same and yet how different!

  To his left, as he overlooked Saunders’ Hole, rose the square tower of Ashover Church, isolated among the water meadows.

  Round the base of the tower he could make out a shimmering group of white objects, objects more congruous with the moonlight than they were with anything else in the world, except certain drifting gusts of gray slanting rain that came up with the west wind.

  Among these tombstones of the generations Rook could distinguish even at this distance the one under which his father had been buried five years before.

  All the rest of his house, from his grandfather back to Lord Roger, the Crusader, were very gently, century by century, becoming less and less distinguishable from the mouse-coloured dust that lay between the chancel slabs.

  Turning to his right, away from the river, he could make Out with hardly less difficulty the shadowy masonry of the house he had just left, standing in the midst of its ghostly lawn, between the branches of its two great trees.

  Those trees looked more monumental than the house itself as he surveyed them now—especially the cedar. That was the tree he had had such trouble climbing as a young boy. He remembered how his grandfather—the one whose bones must still be intact, the bones of a life-weary octogenarian amid that mouse-coloured dust—had been forced to put a ladder to its trunk to bring him down.

  The other tree was a lime, half of whose leaves had already drifted across the road into the ditch behind the milestone. But that tree Rook associated with later happenings, and all hurriedly, for he was loth to change his mood, he surveyed the house; the house of which he was himself the twenty-first possessor, as the guide books proudly put it, in the direct male line.

  Ashover House had been a small house in the 13th Century. In the 17th it had been a spacious one. Now in the 20th Century it was a small house again; the mediæval buttresses, the Tudor staircase, the Jacobean doorway, the Inigo Jones ceiling being the only portions of it that witnessed to its former dignity. For the rest it was a little, old-fashioned, lichen-covered building, dominated by two gigantic trees.

  But small as it was, it had its own mysterious pathos to Rook as he watched it, so hushed and motionless there. Beyond the house his eyes followed the familiar kitchen garden with its high brick walls and well-kept out-houses. And beyond that, too, he looked; to where the trunks of the old apple trees weaving their twisted shadows on the long grass led to the thorn hedge where the yellow-hammers always nested; led beyond that to the rough sloping pasture, thick with mysterious knolls and hollows, which they called Battlefield; led, finally, to the high sentinel row of gaunt Scotch firs that guarded the top of Heron’s Ridge.

  Ragged, yet monumental, desperate in their abandoned gestures, yet sternly taciturn in their rooted immobility, these pine trees had been the background of his imagination as long as he could remember.

  He turned away from them now with a sigh of unconscious distress, and, swinging clear round, gave himself up to the opposite quarter of that transfigured landscape.

  Here he followed the road as it left the church gate and stretched away over the fields and ditches. There was a mile of it before one came to the hamlet, a mile of mud and reeds and floods and marsh fowl, out of the midst of which rose a second bridge across the river, a wooden one with white railings.

  It was the forlornness of this unusual approach as much as the sturdy compactness of the place itself that made whatever view one got of Ashover village a thing extremely sensitive to atmospheric conditions, responsive to every varying shift of wind and weather.

  At this particular hour its little mass of roofs and walls presented the appearance of a miniature city in some old steel engraving. Rook stared at it in half-ashamed sadness. How little he really knew, he to whom the place had given its name, of the actual thoughts, of the actual dramas, that went on under those projecting eaves and contorted chimneys!

  Splash! An enormous water rat dived down from the bank into Saunders’ Hole and proceeded to swim across the river.

  Rook watched its course with curious interest, noting its sublime imperviousness to everything in the world except its immediate purpose.

  There was something about the illuminated ripples that extended behind it, as it swam, that seemed in some way symbolical of all planetary movement. Vivid as quicksilver those ripples flashed, until the shadow of the bridge blotted them out!

  No sooner had the rat reached its goal and vanished in the reeds than the great perch splashed out once more into the moonlight and sank, leaving a new circle of silver ripples, to live for a transitory moment.

  Tired of seeing nothing but these reflected evidences of her power, Ashover leaned back against the stone coping of the bridge and stared up at the great luminary herself. Those queer hieroglyphs written across her face seemed as if they were on the point of revealing, to him alone of all the tribes of men, some incredible world secret. The immense silver disc grew nearer and larger and brighter as he gazed at it. It ceased to be a mere satellite of the earth, a mere mirror of an invisible sun. It became a round illuminated lake that drew him toward it, that drew him into it. The blue-black sky around it became a sloping, slippery shore, that held no ledge, no crevice, to which he could cling; nothing to break the swift, fatal, final slide into that magnetic gulf!

  His neck grew stiff from the way in which he had twisted himself backward. But his fingers did not relax their hold on the stone coping. If some nocturnal bird had been circling above him the creature might easily have mistaken his face for dome inanimate piece of whiteness, set up there as a mark in the night.

  Still he remained motionless, spellbound, ensorcerized; and between the white face looking downward and the white face looking upward a strange correspondency established itself.

  The spell was broken for him at last by the sound of feet upon the road. The footsteps were distant, but the silence of the hour caused them to be to him as though they were a few paces off. Rook crossed the bridge to the farther side and scrutinized the road that led to the village.

  He had not long to wait. Emerging from the shadow of the clump of alders that hid the weir dam‚ where the sheep-washing pool was, came the figure of a man. The figure advanced in a way peculiar to itself. It advanced with difficulty, with a laboured, shuffling, dragging movement, and yet it advanced hurriedly and with a fixed intent. Rook remembered the unswerving preoccupation of the swimming rat.

  The concentrated shuffle of his brother’s feet, the monotonous tap of his brother’s stick, had something about them that was primitive, subhuman, animal. They suggested the presence of an inbitten bodily hurt, the overcoming of which had become automatic, but could never become easy.

  With rapid strides the elder brother hurried to meet the younger. They met at the church gate.

  What Lexie Ashover saw was a tall, dark, massive-featured personage, bony rather than thin, clumsy rather than powerful, whose predominant facial expression was a sort of sullen, puzzled abstraction.

  What Rook saw was an emaciated figure whose large fair head, covered with thick curly hair and out of all proportion to the leanness of his person, had been moulded, in some fit of divine whimsicality, into a startling resemblance to the well-known portrait bust of the Emperor Claudius.

  Both brothers were bareheaded. Both were lifted at that moment above their ordinary level of feeling. But the excitement that was agitating them took in Rook the form of morose abruptness; in Lexie the form of nervous volubility.

  It was a peculiarity of these two to display their affection for each other with a shameless freedom. They kissed each other now in the middle of the moonlit road as if they had been agitated conspirators‚ sealing some covenant of fatal complicity.

  With his fingers twitching nervously at his brother’s overcoat‚ Lexie began talking in a hurried eager voice‚
as if someone or something at any moment might interrupt him.

  “I saw Nell last night; here at this very spot. Our priestly friend had stayed inside the church for some reason; and she had wandered out and was waiting for him just here. Rook‚ I know I’m right in what I told you about her. She’s unhappy. She’s very unhappy.”

  The elder Ashover’s gaze transferred itself from his brother’s face to the wall of the churchyard. “Unhappy‚” he repeated after a pause‚ and the word sounded like the splash of a stone that someone had thrown into a deep well.

  “But, Rook‚ what a girl she is! What a girl! She feels things with her whole body. Do you know what I mean? She thinks with her body.”

  Rook turned his head still farther away.

  “The brain is better for that‚” he muttered; but Lexie went on:

  “I believe she’s reached the point of absolute hatred for him. And shall I tell you what has done it? It’s that book of his—that book.” His brother emitted a sound that might have been a chuckle or a groan. “That book——” repeated Lexie. But the other remained silent.

  “What do you do to all these women, Rook‚ to make them so fond of you? The thing’s getting ridiculous. There’s Cousin Ann—well! We all know what she and Mother are up to! And now it seems as if I’ve only to mention your name to Nell and she jumps out of her skin. Do you know what she said? She said you had a perfect right to live with Netta if you wanted to; and that it was outrageous of people to make such a fuss. She trembled all over like a bit of quaking grass when she talked about it.”

  Rook Ashover made no reply of any kind to this. His face grew hard. But Lexie rambled on without the least embarrassment.

  “It’s no use beating about the bush any more, Rook. You’ve got yourself into a pretty bloody predicament. No one can possibly tell what the upshot will be.”