Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  “Shall we have a light?” he remarked at last, when it seemed to him that Hastings was prepared to go on staring into the darkness without motion or change or limit.

  The man did rise from his seat at this; moving stiffly, like a person whose soul has returned to its body after some long translunar journey. He lit a couple of candled and put them down on the table before him; where they bowed gently in that perfumed air, one after the other, like two grave acolytes in the presence of a dark altar.

  “Hastings,” said Rook all of a sudden when, with no change in his position, the theologian had resumed his mute dialogue with the wordless spaces.

  “Well, Ashover?”

  “If Netta, by any remote chance, does write to you, you won’t fail to let me hear of it at once?”

  Hastings smiled. “Of course I’ll let you know of it, Ashover.”

  The curious thing at this moment was, that, by reason of some inherent duplicity and illusion-weaving power in Nature herself, the priest was actually fortified in his dissimulation by the great flow of honey-scented darkness which now flooded everything and drowned everything.

  It was as if “the still small voice” of the very planet we live upon, when, in the absence of wind or storm, it makes itself felt from its inmost interior integrity, were saturated with some irremediable ultimate evasion. It was as though this old protean universe, when once you reached its native inherent character beneath all its masks and transformations, had its own secretive life illusion, its own eternal magic-bestowing falsehood, from which the subterfuges and equivocations of the human race drew living nourishment.

  “Hastings,” said Rook again. “If you did by any chance find out where Netta was, you haven’t got any grievance against me, have you, that would make you want to hide it from me?”

  Whatever may have been the reservoirs of planetary duplicity from which the priest was able to draw his support there was no need to use them just then; for an interruption occurred which saved him from any reply.

  Two moths, of the species known to entomologists as yellow-underwings, flew into the room together and fluttered straight into one of the candles. Hastings gazed at them without moving; but Rook, springing up from his place, began a series of frantic efforts to catch them in his fingers. He stood by the table, making desperate clutching movements with his hands, while his companion, pushing back his chair a little, watched him gravely and silently.

  One of the moths was caught at last, and going to the window Rook threw it, rather than released it, into the embalmed darkness outside. By the time he returned to the table, however, the other moth was lying singed and dead beside the candlestick.

  “Why didn’t you catch it?” he cried indignantly; and the sudden consciousness of what had really happened—of those two feathered amorists moving together over the dark currant bushes in a mysterious ecstasy; of their being drawn toward a flame that desired them not and indeed knew not of their existence; of their being separated with an absolute and final separation; of the one he had thrown out fumbling vaguely with its antennæ in that immense darkness, from under the shadow of a peony leaf or a dock leaf; fumbling and uttering—who knows?—lamentations and moanings that would sound like the voice of Eros himself if there were ears that could hear it—struck like a spear into Rook’s brain.

  He went to the window, closed it with a violent gesture, and throwing himself down with a groan into the creaking cane chair, rabbed his face with his hands.

  “It’s getting too much for me, Hastings,” he said, “It’s getting altogether too much for me! What qualities ought one to have to be happy in a world like this? Ay? Ay? What has Lexie got, for instance? Courage? A lust for life? A mania for the wretchedest flicker of consciousness, as long as it is consciousness? Oh, I would like to escape from the whole thing! To escape out of it, I tell you, clear, clear out of it!”

  Hastings surveyed the agitated man with a concentrated frown. This interview was beginning to break up the misty veil of more natural human feeling which of late had been forming, like an attenuated film, over the dark river of his thought. The plummet thrown out by Rook’s pessimism reached the surface of that formidable undercurrent and stirred its waters.

  “Why do you say ‘escape’?” he asked sternly. “The longing to ‘escape’ is only the other side of the lust to enjoy. It’s as old as the hills, that ‘clear, clear out of it!’ and it’s as feeble as a baby’s wail.” He looked at Ashover more gently now, as he felt within him, rising up from the depths, the pride of his own life illusion as opposed to the other’s.

  Ashover, too, felt, man-like, the challenge of a conflicting system of metaphysicalized self-assertion, and a gleam of interest in their discussion broke the gloom of his mood.

  “Well? What do you do, Hastings, when you feel the turn of the great screw?”

  “I never feel its turn, Ashover! I have nothing in me to resist it and therefore I can’t feel it. We’re talking in different languages.”

  Rook smiled. “I’ve always wanted to ask you what that book of yours is really about. It seems to me that this is a moment when I may do that.”

  The theologian got up. He walked to the window and opened it wide. Then he came back to the table and blew out both the flames.

  “We needn’t burn any more moths,” he said in a low voice. “You and I can see enough of each other without candles.”

  He resumed his seat and the two men sat silently in their places in that perfumed darkness. There was a syringa bush by the garden gate and the smell of its flowers mingled with the less definite scent of the wide-stretching hayfields. There was a faint dampness in the air from the neighbourhood of so many water brooks, but this only had the effect of making the darkness larger and cooler and more liberating.

  William Hastings gathered up within him those obscure magnetic forces to which human beings give the names of “will” and “thought” and “purpose.” There flowed into the resultant complex of his energy, as the two sat silently there, a desire to undermine the very foundations of this proud, alien, inaccessible soul that lay chafing and fretting before him with this ridiculous wound in its heart. He felt no pity, no sympathy; but the obscure malice which had been slowly accumulating within him for many months took the form now of a longing to overcome the creature’s remoteness and detachment, to invade it, to overwhelm it, to drown its rock base and carry it away on the torrent of his own stronger, more formidable identity.

  With a movement of his fingers that was much more rapid and nervous than usual he struck a match with the mechanical intention of lighting a cigarette. The little burst of sulphurous flame illuminated his own bent head; and at the same time brought his companion’s face up out of what seemed an abyss of nebulous darkness. He shook the flame into extinction and threw the match-end away.

  “There’s no pleasure in smoking when you can’t see the smoke,” he said.

  “Well? Are you going to tell me about your book?” repeated the other.

  There was a moment’s deep silence between them that lay upon the filmy folds of the darkness like a dead child upon a woman’s lap.

  “Ashover!” The word seemed to come from a portion of the man’s being that was behind and beyond his mere physical frame.

  “Well? What is it?”

  “Do you realize that there is a hidden struggle going on in the depths—an appalling struggle—between two Powers that are beyond man and beyond Nature?”

  “I certainly do not,” muttered Rook sullenly.

  “One of these Powers is the life force,” weat on the priest. “The other is the death force. And what I have come to realize lately is this: that just as man can put himself into the magnetic matrix of life and germinate new creations, so he can also unchain the cogwheel and break the mainspring in that ultimate darkness! In other words, Ashover, I have found out that the soul of man is a much more dangerous weapon than is usually imagined.”

  “All this sounds to me very like what I’ve heard in
church,” remarked Rook grimly.

  “It is like that!” cried the priest, “It is! It is! But that only shows that what I’ve discovered answers to an indestructible instinct in the human race.”

  “The human race is not much of a criterion,” grumbled the voice in the cane chair. “It swings east by north; and then it swings west by south. It’s a bloody weathercock, your race instinct!”

  “It hasn’t swung much for the last five thousand years on this matter,” retorted the other. “Against all the claptrap of science it has steadily maintained the one great appalling truth that men and gods and all the living things in nature are only pawns and dice and counters in a conflict between two equal and unfathomable antagonists! Haven’t you yourself felt it, Ashover?” His voice dropped to a penetrating whisper which pierced the darkness like a conspirator’s dagger. “Haven’t you felt that everything you consciously thought and did had behind it something else; gave way into something; just as broken ice gives way? And haven’t you felt that this something was sometimes life and sometimes death? Haven’t you felt that kind of thing, Ashover?”

  Rook’s voice out of the darkness had the sort of tone a floating tree trunk might have had, as it knocked against another, on the dark tide of a swirling river.

  “My good man,” he said, “I’ve felt so often every kind of sickening sensation that I’ve lost the spirit to tabulate them. I don’t see why you should stop at this duality of yours. Why not take it for granted that the universe is crowded with levels, strata, planes, dimensions, altitudes, regions, all of them full of wretched sensitive beings like ourselves longing to escape?”

  The intonation of weary scepticism in his voice seemed to have a peculiarly irritating effect on the priest’s nerves.

  “You’re not serious, Ashover,” he said. “No one who analyses his own feelings can get away from this great undertow of opposite tides—the death urge and the life urge. What I’ve discovered is that we can get behind the scene and pull up the dam, so that the death force can flood the whole field.”

  Rook’s voice became more weary and detached than ever, as all the mysterious polarities in his nature focussed themselves in fierce secretive resistance to this vision that was invading and seeking to dominate his own.

  “I think nothing of these forces of yours, Hastings,” he retorted. “Why stop at life and death? Why not have a whole vortex of conflicting powers? Life and death are just words! All we know is a mad chaotic jumble of things that we call ‘living’ and things that we call ‘dead.’ What I feel is that the whole imbroglio may be a set of obscene dreams, a great concourse of phantasmagoric shadows, most of them disgusting; some of them magically lovely! And what I would like to do is to dive down into some lake of nothingness where you could forget that there ever were such horrors!”

  Hastings became conscious of a definite feeling of anger toward this man. A vague throb in some old deep scar within him reverting to some half-forgotten outrage his pride had received, when he, a child of middle-class origin, had been insulted by these careless aristocrats, began to mingle now with a rationalist’s natural indignation against merely fanciful speculations. These people never took these ultimate issues seriously. They were no more to them than the leap of fish in a mill pond! Phantasmagoric shadows! The great dark fragrant night about him, full of the odours of a red earth, pressed upon his brain with a sense of the thinness, of the irrelevancy, of these bodiless conjectures. Life? Did he not know its bitterness, its brutality only too well? Death? Was not this divine darkness a very symbol of the sweetness of the eternal sleep? He felt that if, at that moment, he could, by raising his hand, have plunged the whole stellar system into final destruction, he would willingly have raised it!

  And this man, this Ashover, had now linked himself with a spirited, amorous girl who would soon—he knew it well enough!—satisfy this tenacious family’s desire to continue alive upon the earth. And his own fragile neurotic Nell was obsessed by her girlish fancy for this indolent sceptic; this persifleur who, with his pools of nothingness, posed as a martyr of remorse because he had driven his mistress out of his house! What did the man know about “Dimensions, levels, regions”? Phrases of that kind, how hollow, how rhetorical they were, with this enchanted June night whispering to them of the realities of life and death!

  Far off across the wide water meadows he could hear at intervals the husky cry of some lonely nocturnal bird, a night-jar, perhaps, or a bittern; and the sound came to him as something that fortified his drastic vision of things. Was he not, himself, a solitary nighthawk crying out aloud, in a language no man understood, as he felt the damp airs of the great flood coming up over the marshes?

  “What I feel about all this”—it was Rook’s voice speaking again, and more wearily, more indifferently than ever—“is that the true reality of things, the reality that we may wake up to when we die, is so completely different from life and death that it is a mere waste of time to argue about it. You say that my longing to escape is only the inverse of—well! of Lexie’s mania for living. But what of your own mania for death and destruction, Hastings? Isn’t that, too, with all the energy you throw into it, just the inverse of what you call the life urge? You are really just as dogmatic in your death-cult as Lexie in his life-cult! What I feed is that the whole thing is so mad and so chaotic that to dispute about it at all is to lend yourself to being fooled and deluded. Better let it alone; and just take each day as it comes.”

  Hastings began to experience one of the most discomforting sensations that the human soul can endure, the sensation of feeling his spiritual pride menaced by something alien, He gave his chair a jerk backward in the darkness and clenched the fingers of his right hand so tightly that the nails nearly pierced the flesh.

  It was absolutely necessary to him at that moment to find himself stronger, more formidable, more evil even, than this man who carried the airy indifference of his class into the very gulfs! And the sophisticated trifler was loved by three women! The struggle between them had by this time become one of those primeval struggles between two horned animals, in which power over nature, power over women, and power over God are fantastically mingled as the elements of a war to the death.

  It seemed to Hastings, at that second, as if their hostility to one another, this sullen obscure wrestling that was going on in the darkness, occupied an arena that sank down into the very navel of the earth.

  He felt a desire to go to the window and lean out. From where he sat he could detect a group of little faint stars; and he tried feebly to recall what constellation it would be that at that particular hour looked down upon Toll-Pike Cottage. A vague uneasiness had begun to trouble his mind; Was it possible that this Pyrrhonian attitude of Rook’s toward life, this careless, indolent, drifting “chaoticism,” gave the man the same advantage over him in philosophy as he possessed in the material world? But how could a person so casual, so formless, so evasive, be as close to the open secret as one who was concentrated and knit together, with a deep hard purpose in his mind?

  He suddenly began to get an impression that Rook was playing with him, had been playing with him during the whole of their talk! That was an old trick of these accursed “upper classes.” You never knew where you were with them; you never knew where you “had” them! Like a cold finger of boreal ice pointing at his central nerve the abominable suspicion began to invade his mind that his whole system of philosophizing was only a weapon in a fierce personal struggle for recognition, for ascendancy. Apparently it was not necessary for an Ashover to have recourse to such weapons! They need not formulate their philosophy. They need not be logical or rational. They could play with the realities of life and death as they played with their dogs and their guns and their girls. They could just lie back upon themselves and be what they were and all the rest of the universe might go on as it pleased! “Chaoticism” indeed! That was exactly the word. To walk through the lanes and the woods; to enjoy his meals; to seduce a girl here and a girl there; and
to hand on his name by a well-timed marriage to another generation, who would also lie back upon themselves and talk of chance and chaos; while he, William Hastings, who had put his whole life’s blood into a book of crushing, deadly, annihilating power only existed as an object of quaint interest, set aside as a fantastic-brained country parson who was useful for reading pious homilies in the presence of Ashover monuments!

  “You won’t deceive me in any way over Netta, Hastings?” The words, coming from the other hidden countenance, in that midnight chamber, floated away out of the window toward the little, unknown group of stars.

  “Deceive you? Why on earth should I deceive you? I tell you you know everything there is to be known in the whole world!”

  The man’s voice took on at that point the peculiar quiver which indicates in highly strung nerves the approach of a collapse of all self-control.

  “Why don’t you apply to the detectives, Ashover!” he went on. “To the detectives!” And suddenly without the least intention he broke into a loud harsh rasping laugh. “The detectives!” he kept on gasping in a choking voice. “The detectives!”

  It was Rook who felt a longing to go to the window now. That little room was becoming intolerable to him. He did, in fact, get up from his seat and stagger to the window sill, his legs numb and stiff; but Hastings was still rocking himself to and fro in such an alarming spasm of laughter that he remained leaning there with his face to the interior of the room.

  The priest’s sinister explosion died down at last and he lifted his head from his hands.

  “So I suppose now,” he said, addressing the dark figure that concealed so much of the starlit window frame, “you’ll have an heir to your historic family.”

  Rook was too surprised by this rude remark to make any answer at all. He began to think the moment had arrived for bidding his host good-night. There evidently was nothing more to be got out of him with regard to Netta and he was in no mood for prolonging this scene.