Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  Lexie nodded grimly.

  “I can’t think what started her drinking like that,” Rook continued. “She never touched liquor when I first knew her; but since that New Year’s Eve party of yours she got worse and worse. She used to drink in her room. I found a lot of bottles afterward; and I could see that Pandie knew about it.”

  Lexie opened his eyes very wide at these words. “You don’t mean to say you didn’t see what was at the bottom of that?” he cried in unfeigned astonishment. “I saw it like a map.”

  Rook stared at him blankly. “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t mean to say you missed the piquancy of that little game,” Lexie went on. “I don’t know how much was due to your philanderings with Ann and Nell; but it was plain to me that Netta had got something on her mind that she was trying to drown; something that egged her on to be absolutely reckless.”

  Rook struggled awkwardly and stiffly to his feet.

  “Did she say anything to you?” he cried harshly.

  “Don’t fly off at a tangent now. You couldn’t have stopped her. It was natural enough.”

  “But she knew Ann and I were old friends. I told her so often. And she hadn’t the least idea there was anything between Nell and me.”

  Lexie smiled complacently and pityingly. “It’s amazing, Rook, how you can be so intuitive with women sometimes and so absolutely blind at other times! I don’t say that your flirtations made her unhappy; but they were quite enough to make her a bit careless of appearances.”

  “Did any one else see what she was doing, do you suppose, except you and that little baggage Pandie?” Rook began swinging his stick as he asked this question. A troubled and nervous desire for some sort of action made it impossible for him to remain still.

  “I have not the least doubt that everyone saw it—except you. I shouldn’t be surprised if Cousin Ann saw it, even before I did.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me, then? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Really, Rook, that’s going a bit too far! Outsiders can hardly be expected to meddle between a man and his girl. Besides, nothing could suit Ann better than that Netta should make herself impossible!”

  Rook let his stick fall to his side.

  “You don’t think she encouraged her in it, do you?” he said in a harsh whisper. “They were always together.”

  Lexie laughed. “There’s a big gap between encouraging a person in a thing and making a fuss to stop them from it. I don’t suppose Ann did anything about it at all. Just watched it going on, as I did, and hoped for the best!”

  Rook’s face was now convulsed with anger. “You were all against her!” he cried. “Every one of you! You all hated her and wanted her to clear out, while you kept me locked up and fed with penny buns like the bear in the Bristol Aquarium!”

  Lexie chuckled with immense zest at this comparison. There was something, he thought to himself, very like a zoo animal about Rook’s sulky restlessness. He got up from the ground and came over to his brother.

  “Come,” he said, “we won’t quarrel over Netta. I would far rather live with Netta, drunk or sober, than be married to Cousin Ann! But don’t look so miserable! If I were married to your wife I would soon put her in her place. And I’d dearly love to do it, too!” he added, with a leer that was at once dictatorial and satyrish. “I’d manage her, brother Rook. I’d tame her.”

  They gathered up the remains of their meal and tossed them into the basket.

  “No, I’ll carry it,” said Rook, “and you take my arm! I can’t have the doctor cursing me for tiring you out over this day’s business. I want to have a lot more jaunts with you this summer.”

  They moved off together along the edge of the lake. For some reason or other Lexie’s blunt, uncompromising attitude to Lady Ann gave Rook a feeling of relief. He felt less submerged, less invaded, less divided from himself with his brother at his side.

  “Well!” he said presently. “This isn’t the first time you and I have walked along this piece of grass. Oh, Lexie, Lexie, what things we have seen and felt together! I know that, wherever I am and whatever I see, there aren’t many objects that catch my notice without my wanting to share them with you. I don’t hold back much from you, Lexie.”

  The younger Ashover irreverently put out his tongue at this.

  “Liar!” he said. “You know perfectly well that you’re as reserved as the devil, even with me! I often feel that you have endless ideas and sensations that you hug to yourself and would hate my getting a hint of. But I do believe you love me, Rook, better than any one else. I think you’ll feel queer, now and then, after I’ve been put by Mr. Pod under that elm tree.”

  Rook’s reply to this was to hang his stick over his wrist and hug his brother tightly in his arms, kissing him repeatedly on cheeks, mouth, eyes, and forehead.

  “Well!” he said breathlessly as he released him, “it’s a good thing that you and I were born under the same roof. Think what it would have been like if we’d just casually glanced at each other on some railway platform or pavement and realized what we’d missed when the crowd divided us! No, no, Lexie. Nothing will make me believe that you won’t live longer than I shall. These doctors are always making mistakes. There! I announce to you, this last day of June and by the edge of this blue lake, that we shall live to walk here together in twelve months’ time, talking just as freely as we’re talking now! Perhaps I shall have found Netta again by then.”

  They looked straight into each other’s faces; and one of those moods that do not often fall upon human beings, unless brought about by the magic of sex, passed over both of them and blended with the noble and spacious purlieus of those manorial woods, with the deep blue of the water, with the brick towers and gray slate roofs of Comber’s End.

  They moved on then; and after walking round a bed of reeds, from which a moor hen and its half-grown family splashed out into the open pond raising a thousand iridescent ripples, they came to a pause by a low ornamental wall decorated at intervals by brick pilasters the capitals of which were covered with the white droppings of innumerable swallows who made them starting points for their flights over the lake.

  The two Ashovers sat down upon the sun-warmed coping of this low wall, a pleasant relic of the times when the Lords of Comber’s End were the feudal enemies of their own family. It gave Lexie, who was something of an antiquary in these historic matters, quite a complacent thrill to be able to remind Rook how long ago it was that the last of these hereditary foes had died childless. “It would have given him a shrewd slap in the eye,” he grossly chuckled, “if he could have looked forward a couple of hundred years and seen us sitting here in ease and satisfaction.”

  Rook sighed. “Perhaps not,” he said. “He may even be at this very moment anticipating the blow that’s going to finish us off. How do we know that Ann’s child won’t turn out a girl? If it does, that’ll end it! Comber’s End and Ashover’s End—there’ll be nothing to choose between’ em.”

  “Why do you say ‘that’ll end it’?” protested the other. “It looks to me as if my sister-in-law were good for more than one fling of this sort.”

  Rook was silent. Why had he said just that? The words had seemed to come from him with the smooth and suave fatality of speech which makes it difficult for poets to say “earth” without saying “green” and “sky” without saying “blue.”

  “Somehow,” he contented himself with replying, “I can’t imagine Ann not having a son for her first child.”

  He smiled at that moment to himself; for he thought how Lexie would have jumped out of his skin if he had answered him by saying that he had himself, that very morning, seen with his own eyes the boy that was to be born!

  “By the way,” he enquired casually, “do you know if there are any young people at the farm here now?”

  Lexie looked at him significantly and quickly. “I’ve a good reason to know,” he said; “but I was going to keep it from you for a bit longer. As a matter of
fact, there’s a very handsome youth there and a charming young girl. I know it because I had a companion with me when I drove out here this morning.”

  It was Rook’s turn to show signs of agitation.

  “What’s this?” he flung out. “You don’t mean to say——”

  Lexie interrupted him. “It’s Nell,” he cried hurriedly. “Don’t get annoyed with me, Rook! I met her quite by chance and begged Twiney to stop and pick her up. She was setting out to see this youth and his sister on some parochial affair of Hastings’s. Hastings puts lots of things of that kind off on her.”

  “Where is she now?” The words broke from the elder man with an impatience and eagerness that surprised himself.

  “I don’t know where she is now,” answered Lexie. “I told her we’d call at the house and take her home late in the afternoon. I meant to keep it as a surprise for you, so, for God’s sake, don’t look so sick!”

  Rook “sleeked over,” as the poet says, his agitated expression; and picking up a loose piece of masonry from the wall beside him flung it into the water. The missile caused an enormous circle of ripples which enlarged and enlarged under their eyes.

  “Do you remember how we used to play ducks and drakes in this pond?” he said. “I can’t remember now where we got the stones.”

  “Under the house, over there,” said the other. “You used to send me off to get them while you went on reading your book!”

  Once more, deep down underneath the immediate agitation of Nell’s presence between them, the old familiar thrill of their intimate association ran through Rook’s soul. He watched the ripples that he had made in the water go on extending and extending toward the centre of the lake. “When Lexie and I are together,” he thought, “it’s as if a new personality were created that throws a glamour over the tiniest little thing that happens.”

  “Do you believe,” he said aloud, “that there’s any chance—any shadow of a shadow of a chance—that you and I will meet again after we’re dead?”

  Lexie’s answer to this was not lacking in either emphasis or assurance.

  “Not the faintest,” he said with a smile. “While either of us is alive the other will, in a sense, go on living. But when we’re both dead, we’re both dead. Do you realize what to be dead actually means, brother Rook? I sometimes have the feeling that in that matter I have more imagination than you!”

  When he turned to see the effect of his words upon his companion he saw Rook’s gaze intently fixed on something on the lake which was obscured from his own sight by a tuft of reeds. But a moment later he, too, saw it—the form of an incredibly proud and majestic swan, paddling slowly toward them.

  The bird was so beautiful that the vision of it passed beyond the point where either of them could share the feelings it excited with the other. It seemed to bring with it an overpowering sense of awe; for both the Ashovers regarded its advance in spellbound silence. It was as if it were floating on some mysterious inner lake that was, so to speak, the platonic idea, or the ethereal essence, of the actual lake which they were contemplating. It might have been swimming on an estuary that had suddenly projected itself into our terrestrial spaces from a purer level of existence, some tributary of the Eternal and the Undying, that flowed in for one ineffable second of time, converting the watery element it mingled with into its own ethereal substance.

  The spell of its approach was broken as soon as the bird itself realized that the Ashover brothers were not two motionless tree-trunks, but alien and disturbing invaders. It swung round with a proud curve of its great neck and an eddy of the blue water about its white feathers, and sheered off toward the centre of the pond.

  Rook and Lexie regarded its departure with concentrated interest; but now that the magical moment had passed they were able to note the almost humorous effect of the swan’s attempts to retain his impassive dignity, to show appropriate indignation, and at the same time to put a good clear space of deep lake water between himself and the onlookers.

  “Susannah and the Elders!” murmured Lexie with a chuckle. “But aren’t they provocative and tantalizing? I wish we could hide ourselves in the reeds and see it making love to Leda. What a shame Nell isn’t here!”

  “It’s its neck that’s so arresting,” said Rook. “That sense of incalculable power mixed with serpentine beauty!”

  “I don’t know about that,” remarked Lexie, “but I would give a great deal to see Nell caressing it.”

  A heathen and classic wantonness descended upon both men. They began to feel an irritable desire to separate from each other and find, each for himself, a companion as beautiful and capricious as that proud bird.

  “I don’t see why we should wait till the end of the afternoon,” said Lexie, “before getting hold of Nell. What do you feel about going straight up to the house now?”

  “All right,” Rook agreed. “Only you know what that means? It means we’re bound to quarrel! Won’t you admit now that this whole business is a mad obsession? Here we sit, you and I, in the very acme of our precious day; everything enchanting round us, everything doubly delicious because we’re together; and the mere sight of that bird’s neck sets us off on the old wretched will-o’-the-wisp hunt, ‘over bog, over briar,’ though we know perfectly well that the whole thing’s an illusion!”

  Lexie made a deprecatory grimace. “Not an illusion at all. That’s one of those tiresome metaphysical tricks you’re always indulging in. Besides, it doesn’t mean any very great separation. We usually come back to each other pretty quick, good luck or bad luck! Do you remember in old days how we used to set out for a bit of sport to Tollminster Great Fair? Have you forgotten those fields down by the river at Bishop’s Forley? Or those seats under the trees at Polberry Cross? You used to be much more excited than I was when we started off, after breakfast, on a fine August day. That’s just what you double-faced metaphysicians are always up to! You want to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. You want to call honest natural pleasure an illusion; and yet you’re more frantic to get hold of it than any one else!”

  Rook sighed heavily. His brother’s words, bringing back the long summer days of that old, careless, irresponsible life, made him feel the full weight of all his present miseries. Oh, why couldn’t one separate altogether the spirit of adventure in these things from the wretched entanglements that come in their train? The outrageous notion came into his head of how lovely it would be if these irresistible beings, who allured him so, were as heartless and emotionless as that clouded-yellow butterfly whose flight he was now observing! Why couldn’t it have been arranged like that; emotion and attraction remaining absolutely distinct things? They were distinct in him! Why couldn’t they be distinct in everyone? And then, as the image of Netta’s face as she had turned toward him on that last day in their room rose up before his mind’s eye, he knew that all this chatter about sport and pleasure was a mere ruffling of the surface of reality. How could one even dream of girls being like clouded-yellow butterflies, when that single look, terrible and beautiful “as an army with banners,” in the face of one of them, was enough to take the taste out of all food and the sweetness out of all sunshine?

  “Let’s walk once across the field before we do anything else,” he said sadly; and Lexie was far too sympathetic to the fitful moods of his brother, and far too sagacious, to utter a word of protest.

  So, turning their backs to that blue water, they moved slowly side by side across the sunlit park land. The oaks were beginning to cast shadows now, short abrupt shadows, the hot shadows of an early summer afternoon, smelling of moss and the breath of cattle and of puff-ball funguses.

  The horses, which Rook had passed earlier that day, stood crowded together in the shade; while the brown-and-white cows, beginning to grow restless at the approach of milking time, moved uneasily along the edge of the meadow palings, snuffing the air and lowing.

  They crossed the whole expanse of the grass in silence, and when they reached the road Rook could see that L
exie showed signs of feeling his malady upon him. They sat down by the roadside under a beech tree, where the ground was covered with last year’s leaves and the scattered husks of beech mast. Here Lexie produced his little box and swallowed the last two tablets which it contained.

  “I must have another,” he murmured. “He said I could take three.”

  He dropped the empty box on the ground beside them and produced an unopened one from his pocket. Out of this, when he had broken its wrapper, he extracted one more tablet and swallowed it hurriedly.

  “Let’s have a look!” cried Rook, taking the little box into his hands.

  The strain of suffering passed very quickly out of the younger man’s face; as if his faith in the beneficent drug had the power of anticipating its chemical and physical effect.

  “Ten of those little things,” he said, “would finish you off, Rook. I fancy it would need about fifteen to kill me, as I’ve become inured to it. Odd, isn’t it? Think now—how simple it would be for both of us to gulp them down, one after another; and then just to light our last cigarettes and make ourselves ready for Eternity. We’re in such a convenient place, too! Twiney would be bound to find us; and he could bundle us into the bottom of his cart as if we were venison. Nell would have to sit by his side with one foot on you and one foot on me. It would be quite a cortège-macabre. The whole village would turn out to see us go by. You know how the rumour of those things runs in front of the thing itself? ‘The brothers Ashover, furtively but blamelessly pursuing their last journey into their native domains.’ Can’t you hear how Hastings would describe it to his friend in Bishop’s Forley? Can’t you catch the unctuous clerical humour enhancing the taste of the well-baked tea cakes on some little tennis-lawn?”

  Rook, who was holding the box tightly in his fingers, looked at his brother with a scowl. “I think it’s extremely wrong of Twickenham to let you have so many of these damned things! You might easily swallow them in your sleep; or even forget how many you’d taken and take an overdose. Really, Lexie; I mean what I say! It’s not right. I don’t like it. There! I’m cursed if I’ll give them back to you!” And he proceeded to put the box into his own pocket.