After a quarter of an hour’s walking along the Roman road he came to a lane on his right which was as thickly overgrown with summer grass as if it had been a narrow elongated meadow. “To Comber’s End” said the signpost at the corner; and Rook hastened down this propitious avenue of greenness with a nearer approximation to a light heart than he had known for many a long day.
After following the lane’s winding course for some twenty minutes and getting, as it seemed, deeper and deeper into a maze of ancient orchards and dark-stemmed covers he came to a place where his path widened out into a kind of miniature parkland.
Acres of velvety grass dotted with thick-trunked oak trees lay spread out before him in the hot, shadowless noon sunshine, with a herd of brown-and-white cattle feeding on one side of it and a group of horses lying asleep on the other.
The scene had that peculiar monumental quality under the cloudless sun, such as does not often, even in the most privileged localities, arrest the traveller’s attention. It struck Rook now as if it came to him with the weight of a whole series of complicated human impressions behind it. It seemed to summon him forth, as it must have summoned his ancestors before him, out of the cluttered distractions of the passing hour into some larger, nobler world, some world that lay all the while only just behind the familiar, the taken-for-granted, the common undistinguished face of crude reality!
He crossed the grass with a happy liberated step; passed close to the sleeping horses whose huge and sprawling abandonment had something so naked, so animal about it—their legs and hooves protruded so shamelessly from their round bellies!—that he felt as if he were some shadowy supernumerary come to life in the rich canvas of a Tintoretto or a Titian; one of those carelessly sketched anonymous figures whose business it is to stare modestly and self-effacingly at some great mythopœic event whose “persons” are gods and beasts and heroes.
Passing down an avenue of chestnut trees, whose branches made a flickering catafalque over his head, he came to the edge of the little lake on the farther side of which the Comber’s End manor house stood.
The place was as majestic and undisturbed as if the centuries had passed over it like a flock of wild geese dropping nothing but a few gray feathers to mark their flight.
The kitchen garden of the manor farm was surrounded by a high brick wall, the eastern side of which abutted upon the lake, leaving only a narrow footpath, overgrown with tangled vegetation, between it and the actual water.
Rook, as he saw all this, was suddenly almost glad that he had not come bolt upon his brother! That peculiar thrill, unlike anything else in the world, that trembles through us when, quite alone, we arrive suddenly upon a scene that answers to our deepest æsthetic exigencies is quickly dissipated by the neighbourhood of even the most friendly alien personality.
It establishes itself, this feeling, as if it were a furtive, intimate understanding between ourselves and whatever scene it may be answers to our craving.
And such moments have another, a yet more subtle value; namely, their power of linking themselves up in some mysterious way with all the other past moments of a similar nature that we have passed through in the course of our life. Toward these other moments the present one seems to gravitate by a natural affinity, taking its place among them and establishing itself among them, in such a way as to draw them out more clearly, more definitely, from their hidden retreats, and to make us more vividly aware of them.
It is then that we become conscious that in addition to the ordinary gregarious human life, led by us in contact with others and in the stress of our normal pursuits, there is another, a more intimate life, solitary and detached, that has its own days and months and years, such as are numbered by no measurings of common time, by no computation on any terrestrial almanac.
Underneath the procession of our normal days the visions of these solitary moments mingle and flow, making the dust and noise of the overt drama of our life seem crude and vulgar in comparison. They have nothing to do with the emotional or with the rational processes of our nature, these moments of vision. They are purely æsthetic. Yet they are not æsthetic in the sense of being entirely preoccupied with what is usually called beauty. The more definite and more suggestive word “magic” indicates better the quality to which they respond. For “magic” can be felt, both in landscapes and in other places, where there are few elements of those high mysterious values which we associate with the beautiful.
As Rook stood now on the edge of Comber’s End Pond and watched the moor hens and coots and wild ducks floating upon water that was the colour of lapis-lazuli, it was not the beauty of the scene that carried his consciousnes down that strange interior river, under ancient bridges and by hushed gardens, past shadowy terraces and turreted towers, past lonely towpaths and long-stretching melancholy roads! It was something that might easily have worked its charm upon him had the place lacked almost all the gracious beauty it possessed; had it been no more than a couple of stunted pine trees staring down upon the raw edges of a deserted quarry!
Rook’s own particular response to the accidental groupings of scenery was something that implied sometimes a vindictive malice against the richer forms of loveliness and an obstinate sullen preference for things that were abject, woebegone, god-forsaken. Thus were certain peculiar characteristics in his erotic life transferred to his æsthetic life; and the misery of his yearning to comfort the unhappy Netta found itself balanced by his malignant reaction from the brilliant Ann.
Suddenly to his immense astonishment he caught sight of his brother where least of all he had expected to find him; and as he chuckled to himself and waved his stick in the air he became for a moment a completely different human being.
Gone were all his dark manias and phobias. Gone were all the mystic ecstasies of his secretive personal life. In one great wave of joyous rejuvenation he became a boy again with the companion of his boyhood!
An aspen poplar, blighted by some long-forgotten thunderstorm, stretched a great dead leafless branch, bifurcated in the centre, right over the surface of the lake. Out upon this perilous projection the reckless invalid had managed to climb; and there he lay, in serene and triumphant complacency, his Cæsarean head propped against the blackened trunk and his thin bare legs dabbling in the water. He had been there all the while, watching Rook with a whimsical amusement, and all he did now, when his elder brother walked over to his retreat, was to greet him with such a satiric grimace that Rook felt the same disturbed boyish embarrassment that he used to feel in the very old days when Lexie took him to task for some piece of egoistic priggishness which he had hoped had passed unnoticed by that cynical eye.
“You don’t expect me to join you out there, I hope,” said the elder Ashover, regarding his brother’s position with some apprehension. “What have you done with poor Twiney and his cart?”
Lexie’s only reply to this was to make a second grimace which crumpled up his classical countenance till it resembled one of those goblinish tailpieces with which 18th-century publishers used to adorn their more decorative quartos.
“Don’t you worry about your lunch before the moment I’ve arranged for it, brother Rook,” he remarked after a moment of silence; during which Rook seated himself upon the bank at the foot of the tree. “The amazing thing is that I’ve managed to get you here at all considering the way you’ve treated me these last weeks.”
“Ay? What’s that? Oh, you mean that I’ve been more often to Toll-Pike than to your place? What nonsense! I haven’t seen Nell for the last fortnight and we’ve been together twice—no, three times!—in that time.”
Lexie settled himself more comfortably in his seat, drew out of his pocket a small cardboard box, rattled it vigorously, opened it, shook the contents into the palm of his hand, and conveying it from there to his mouth, swallowed it at a gulp.
“What’s that?” enquired Rook, lighting a cigarette and stretching out his legs in luxurious contentment.
“Morphia tablets,” replied hi
s brother with ironic brevity.
There was a touch of bitterness, of faint reproach even, in the tone with which those two sinister words were uttered, which Rook did not miss.
The two men looked for a moment into each other’s eyes. Rook was the first to remove his gaze; and as he turned it upon the sunlit waters of that great placid pond that he and Lexie had visited together from their earliest childhood, a sharp pang, different in its nature from any he had been feeling before, went through his heart.
What would he do, how could he endure his life, when this brother of his had been driven from his last stronghold, from the bifurcated branch of Ygdrasil, the World Ash tree, and had slipped into a lake deeper than that of Comber’s End?
CHAPTER XX
IT WAS under the heavy green of a midsummer chestnut tree, of all trees the one which takes to itself most completely the character of that umbrageous season, of that interlude in the year’s progression, when the “primal burst” is over and the yellows and purples of the August efflorescence are still unbudded, that Rook and Lexie unpacked Mrs. Bellamy’s basket and enjoyed the culminating hour of their fête-champêtre.
The chestnut’s branches, with their huge, somnolent leafy fingers hovering above them like an indulgent episcopal benediction, stretched out over the smoothly running brook which fed the water mill at the eastern extremity of the lake. Here Rook ate his meal, seated with his back against the trunk of the tree; while his brother, with that invincible desire to give every passing moment some additional heightening, which the fatality of his illness had begun to accentuate to a point of actual recklessness, had succeeded in balancing himself on one of the great motionless spokes, covered now with moss and ferns, that in former times used to turn the machinery of the mill.
The younger Ashover had finished his lunch—his taste for food was growing steadily more capricious and fastidious—and was now smoking one cigarette after another, as he sat hunched up there above the stream with his knees beneath his chin.
“I hope that wheel won’t suddenly begin to turn,” said Rook. “How does it manage to stay still with the water flowing on underneath it?”
“It’s not really flowing,” said the other. “To make it come with a proper rush, strong enough to move the wheel, they’d have to lift up some dam on the other side.”
They both remained silent, listening to the monotonous ripple of the little brook as it eddied and gurgled round the stones in its shallow bed.
“There’s a trout!” cried Lexie suddenly. “Did you see it? It went under that green stone. Do you remember how we used to catch them in a butterfly net by damming up the pools under the bank?”
Rook shook his head. “I’d forgotten that,” he said. “But I remember how you always used to say that a fresh-caught trout, lying stone dead in a handful of grass, was one of the objects a person would remember most vividly if he had been transported to a different planet and was trying to recall the most characteristic and delicious things in his old earth life. The look of those silvery scales and purple spots, with the little bits of bright-green grass sticking to them, was only rivalled by one other thing in the world you used to say.”
“What was that?” enquired Lexie.
“The smell of the inside of a pea’s pod when you’ve just shred the peas?” pondered Rook gravely. “Or the smell of one of those squares of fresh turf in a wheelbarrow when someone’s making a new lawn; or the smell of honeysuckle, when it’s very yellow and a little faded? No! I don’t believe it was the smell of anything! What was it that you used to put second to the trout?”
He mused for a minute or two in a silence that was full of the faint ripple of the stream and of the distant murmur of wood pigeons.
“I know!” he cried eagerly. “No; it wasn’t a smell. It was the look of silverweeds, all covered with white dust, at the edge of a road that’s just going over a hill from which you can see the sea!”
Lexie stared at him from his precarious seat on the mill wheel with a strange, intent absorption; an absorption so deep that Rook became aware that his mind had wandered away from their conversation. His eyes as he stared grew larger and more wistful, and the elder brother became uneasy and in some way put to shame by their expression.
There came over him, as he met their unseeing gaze, a sensation of the most heartbreaking sadness; that sort of sadness which comes upon us when in the middle of some hot cornfield, between the singing of larks and the hum of the cutting machine, between yellow stalks and red poppies, we hear the tolling of the village bell and think of the raw, open oblong hole in that crowded enclosure and of the white surplice of the priest!
“I’m getting stiff sitting here,” said Lexie breaking the spell. “Give me your stick a moment.”
Rook held out to him the end of his stick and his brother pulled himself up by its assistance and jumped upon the bank. Here he lay down upon the sun-flecked moss, his head against the other’s knees. Rook ran his fingers over the embossed corrugations and deep-dented furrows of the younger man’s heavy forehead.
“I wish to the devil,” he said abruptly, “that you and I were quite alone in the world! Think what it would be like,” he went on, “if this evening I were coming back with you to Marsh Alley, and there were no one in Ashover House except complete strangers! Mrs. Bellamy could look after us both perfectly well; and we’d have nothing to think of—no worries, no responsibilities!—nothing but just to read and talk and walk and watch the changes of the weather.”
“You might have done it if you’d really wanted to,” said Lexie.
Rook’s hand left his brother’s forehead and made an impatient clutch at the moss and the dry rubble.
“That’s a cruel thing to say; and you know very well it’s a silly thing, too. I couldn’t have left Mother alone. I might as well say to you that if you’d really wanted us to live together you’d have never gone off to Marsh Alley at all.”
Lexie shifted his position a little so as to get his face into the sunshine.
“How could I live in that house with you and the old man cursing each other all day long? It was you who begged me to go off, so that we should have a place where we could be at peace!”
“Then why did you talk just now about my leaving Ashover and living with you? We did practically live together in those days. I was always coming over to you. You know I was, Lexie.”
The younger man’s tone softened. “I know it, Rook, I know it. It’s only been this last year, since you brought your girl here, that we’ve been really separated. Why did you do it, Rook? Why did you do it?”
“I wish to the devil I hadn’t done it!” cried the other fiercely. “It was only that that made Mother bring Ann here; and if she hadn’t come, we might have been just as we were!”
“You’d have got some other girl; or I should,” said Lexie. “No, it’s no use blaming each other. It’s all natural enough.”
“It isn’t natural,” shouted Rook; and Lexie, though he couldn’t see Rook’s face, was only too well aware of the quivering and tightening of his upper lip and the protrusion of a vein in his forehead.
“It’s a monstrous mania, this obsession we both have for young girls! It’s inherited from the old man; just as he inherited it from his father! It was a beautiful piece of irony, just worthy of the way things work out, that it was Grandfather’s bastard who landed me with Ann. And then the trouble I’ve had with Betsy; and with Nancy’s luckless progeny! I tell you it’s a monstrous obsession; that’s what it is!” Lexie got up and sat in a pool of flickering golden sunshine, hugging his knees.
“I cannot understand,” he said, “how you can be what you are, with flashes of noble insight such as you have, and then fall back like this. When you talk as you’ve just been talking I feel only one thing for you, brother Rook.”
“What thing?” enquired the other in a more normal tone.
“Contempt,” was the younger Ashover’s laconic answer.
“Lexie, that’s not fair,�
�� protested the accused man with the peculiar expression of half-ironic, half-authentic humility which he always assumed under a frontal attack. “Why is it contemptible to call this thing an obsession?”
“Because you sing such a bloody song about it, and then go on exactly the same! Why can’t you treat your girls as girls ought to be treated; and as, in their hearts, they like to be treated? Why can’t you just enjoy them for what they are and let them know what you are; without making such a devil of a fuss about it? It was a piece of pure sentimentality to bring Netta here in the beginning. And then, to go and marry Ann just because you’d taken your pleasure——”
“But, good Lord!” Rook interrupted, “one can’t get one’s cousin, and a girl like Ann, too, into trouble and ‘nothing said’!”
The invalid made one of his most goblin-like grimaces at this.
“She got her pleasure out of it as well as you, brother Rook, and as for the results—oh, well! It’s no good going back on all that now. When is her child to be born?”
He flung out the question with as much nonchalance as if it had been of very small moment whether Ashover had an heir or not.
“In September, I suppose,” answered the other. In the silence that followed this, Rook’s mind wandered off to Netta and a miserable frown came upon his forehead as with his eyes watching the movements of a pair of green finches in a small hazel bush beyond the stream he wondered whether that drinking habit into which she had flung herself had gone from bad to worse. “I’ve done it for the best,” ran the phrase in her letter. Did that refer to the drinking? And if so, what did she mean?
“What’s the matter now?” enquired Lexie, and his elder brother began to explain how his remorse about Netta’s disappearance was mixed with his fear of the effect of drink upon her.
“You know what it is,” he said. “Men can drink heavily without its changing their life. I don’t think women can do that. If once they get any real dependence on it, they’re lost! Their whole nature seems to go to pieces.”
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