Ducdame (14 page)

Coming round the corner of the wall they found themselves on the edge of a little deserted paddock, bordered by a fence of loose stones and extending clear down to the first of the ditches, over the dark surface of which hung, sideways and drooping, the heavy trunks of a couple of pollard willows.

“Look!” cried Cousin Ann. “There it is!” and she pointed to the extreme edge of the western horizon, above which, sure enough, floated the thinnest, frailest moon-sickle that she had ever seen!

Squadrons of vaporous clouds kept up a perpetual march across it; but there it was—“Astarte, Queen of Heaven, with crescent horns!”—and the power of its presence, like the presence of the youngest, most fragile daughter of an old tragic dynasty, reached them through the night and blended
with the vague earthy smells that came floating up from the shadowy fens.

“I’m glad we came, aren’t you?” the girl whispered, aware of a great leap of power and strength in the very depths of her being. “
You
thought of coming, though. I should never have done it alone.”

She laid the tips of her fingers on her companion’s sleeve, and the effect of this slight contact was enough to enhance to a point of magnetic intimacy her feeling of power.

“Tell me, now, will you; now we’re alone here, what you really are saying in that book?”

William Hastings swung round as quickly as if he had been struck by an invisible arrow.

“What’s that?” he cried hoarsely. “Leave
that
,
please, Lady Ann Poynings!”

But the girl watched the horned and crescented mystery, cutting its path through the clouds, like a fairy scimitar through a froth of soapsuds, and she remorselessly went on.

“Why should I leave that, William Hastings? I’m
intelligent
enough to know that what you’re doing is no trifle, is perhaps of the greatest importance to us all.”

“No trifle and of great importance!” he repeated
mockingly
. But she could see he was yielding a little, and she laid her hand again on his coat sleeve.

“Do tell me! Do take me into your confidence!”

He was evidently impressed by her words. He looked round furtively as if to make sure there was no one within hearing.

“May I ask you a question, Lady Ann?” he said.

Cousin Ann smiled in the darkness. “Why not?
Especially
since I’m asking
you
such terrific impertinences!”

“Well, then, would you be good enough to tell me what is your motive for going on living in this disgusting world?”

“You mean for not committing suicide?”

“Not at all! I mean for wishing your life to continue; for
wishing the life of the world to continue; for wishing that life
as
life should conquer death
as
death.”

“But it never can
completely
conquer death, can it?”

It was his turn now to snatch hold of her wrist in the darkness.

“Never completely. No; never completely! But it can conquer it very far. It can conquer it so far as to encourage men, beasts, birds, fishes, to go on with the huge stupidity! It can conquer it so far as to encourage intelligent women still to persist in bearing children!”

Ann Poynings extricated her wrist from his unconscious clutch. Was all this a mere bookworm’s eccentricity, or was the man actually out of his wits?

“Well?” she pursued. “And your idea is to analyze the motives that make people go on living when they are sick of life? Is that it, Mr. Hastings?”

He suddenly threw out both his arms toward her, so that she started back with considerable alarm; but he laid his hands on her shoulders and spoke thick and fast.

“I’ve always known you weren’t quite like the rest. I’ve always known I
could
tell you about it,” he began. “The Ashovers are enslaved by their sensations. They live for their sensations. But you’re different. You live for
something
else. They are all nothing to me, I tell you. No one is anything to me except as a proof of my discovery! It’s like this. What I’ve found out is the original secret of
Life-Destruction
; the great anti-vital energy, the death energy! What I’ve found out is the thing that one of the old poets symbolized once as the Breath of Demogorgon. It is just as much an organic force, an actual magnetic force, as radium or electricity. But it is more powerful than these because it belongs to the soul.”

He paused breathlessly and dropped his hands from her shoulders.

“I know,” he began again, after another anxious glance
round, to make sure they were alone, “that what I’ve
discovered
is not a mere metaphysical theory. Do you know how I know it?”

His voice became lower and more furtive and he leaned close to her in the darkness.

“I know it by actual evidence here in Ashover! No—don’t run away. They can wait. You
must
hear me out now I’ve begun to speak. Ever since I came to this place I have been conscious of the power the dead have to preserve something of themselves alive in the world! Old families, like these Ashovers, have this power; just as old planets, like Saturn and Uranus, have it. Now do you know what I am doing? I am thwarting these dead!
I
am
driving
them
back.
I say this to you so that you can bear witness to the truth. There’ll be no more Ashovers born into
Frome-side
. Rook and Lexie are the last!”

Lady Ann instinctively pressed her hands against her body as if to assure herself of its material substantiality. There was something so sinister and ghastly in the man’s tone, and something so formidable in the perverse power that emanated from him, that she felt for a moment actually weak and faint. What horrible instinct of a distorted brain made him say these things to
her
rather than to any one else?

She glanced across the hushed empty fields, lying dim and vague before them. She searched for that “miraculous crescent”, but while they had looked away, it had been swallowed up by the clouds. Alone with this sombre figure of negation, hovering there like a great gray owl in front of her, in starched shirt and woolly overcoat, her mind clouded and darkened, she felt as if she were struggling with some hideous sort of nightmare. The whole scene—the blank wall, the dark forms of the willows, the hoar frost on the grass—all seemed unreal, fantastic, like something that must be broken to pieces by an effort of the will!

That she—Ann Poynings—should be spending New Year’s Eve with a human being dominated by such woe-begotten fancies, rumoured out of the remote heathen Past with “Gorgons, Hydras, and Chimæras dire,” seemed to suggest some mad hallucination. It must be, she thought, the troubled expectation in her nerves as to what might come of the affair with Rook that exposed her so to this lunatic’s chatter. She would throw the crazy enchantment off, break it up, return to her normal vision!

With a gallant effort of all the forces of her strong and cynical youth she did turn upon him now with a forced lightness of tone that would have changed the whole temper of the conversation with any one but William Hastings.

“But what about the book, Mr. Hastings? The question as to whether it is better for old families to die out or not to die out does not seem to require a whole volume.”

The change in her tone seemed quite lost upon him in his excitement, but he had built up such an edifice of secrecy about his thoughts that to express himself with any clearness had become impossible.

“My book?” he muttered. “My book? I can’t explain it to you now. It goes too far, too deep. Some day all the world will know. When I am dead, Lady Ann; when I am dead! But I have written it all down; step by step I have made it all plain. Every page has that breath upon it which the old poet talks of, the breath of Demogorgon! And when I am dead and they understand what I’ve discovered, what a power I shall have put into the souls of men! I shall have given man the power to counteract the creativeness of God. And Man shall say, ‘Let there be Darkness!’ and there shall be Darkness.”

His voice died away over the frozen meadows. “Let us go back. Let us go in,” he said after a pause. “I don’t suppose that any human creature has ever felt the disgusting loathsomeness of life more than I have. Too many horrible
things! Too many horrible thoughts! Oh, what a day—what a day—when it is all absolutely wiped out!”

They turned back together up the lane and stopped at Lexie’s house. They could see the illuminated figures of their friends between the curtains of the room upstairs.

Mr. Hastings opened the gate into the little garden for his companion to pass in before him.

“Look at that!” he whispered, pointing to the window above. “It’s all futility and disgustingness. Poison and ratsbane! Nettles and snakes! Frog spawn and fœtus! And it’s the same up in the sky as in that silly room!” And he turned his accusing face toward the three stars of Orion’s Belt, which were all of the celestial luminaries at present visible through the overhanging clouds.

“Shut the gate and come in, Mr. Hastings,” called Cousin Ann from the doorstep. She had already rung the bell and had heard Mrs. Bellamy approaching from the kitchen.

T
HERE was about half an hour more of the old year to tick itself away on Lexie’s clock. The company had arranged itself by a kind of selective felicity such as rarely emerges from the shuffling of the chance movements in a group of friends.

Nell Hastings, in a mood of radiant excitement, was seated by Rook’s side, talking with a reckless abandonment that was probably the result of the ritualistic bowl of punch, mixed and stirred with exquisite care by their host’s hand, which stood in the centre of the room.

Lexie himself seated on a hard-backed chair was reading aloud in a murmuring, chanting voice, from the Oxford Book of English Verse, while Cousin Ann and Mr. Hastings, from opposite ends of the rug-covered sofa, listened to him with an attention that was at once entranced and wandering; the sort of attention that strangers in a foreign temple might offer to an alien liturgy.

Netta, isolated from the rest even more than Cousin Ann was isolated from Mr. Hastings, sat in Lexie’s especial
armchair
watching Rook and Nell with an inscrutable smile.

Every now and then, unnoticed by any of the others except Lady Ann, she moved across to the table and replenished her glass from the deep nutmeg-scented bowl, whose silvery depths seemed as misty as her own cloudy thoughts.

By degrees the intent look with which she regarded her protector and his young companion changed its character. Her fixed mysterious smile degenerated into a fatuous stare and that again into an expression which resembled the ostentatious restraint of a burst of silly giggling.

The clock on the mantelpiece had now reached a point indicative of there being only fifteen minutes left of the year that was sinking into the gulf.

Lexie was reading Shakespeare’s “The Phœnix and the Turtle.” One by one the richly cadenced quatrains of the mysterious poem, thrown into a solemn relief by the unction of his voice, accompanied by the slow swaying of his heavy head as the music of the words took possession of him, even as the Delphic vapours were wont to intoxicate the Oracular priestess, fell grandly and fatally upon the rushing surface of that tidal ebb of the river of time, so soon to be swallowed up:

Like the corpses of royal children, slain in some religious holocaust, wrapped up in cerements of gold, the slow, gnomic, litany-sad syllables, murmured in Lexie’s deep hieratic voice, sank down into that flowing stream and disappeared for ever.

What planetary mystery, beyond the death dirge of human love, beyond the annihilation of human faith, had the great poet in his mind as he composed these extraordinary strophes?

The clock on the mantelpiece had reached the point of
three minutes to midnight now; and though Nell’s low eager voice talking to Rook had not ceased, one could note that it kept breaking and hesitating, as if the girl has been spiritually aware, without being mentally conscious, that the death and birth of time itself were interchanging their
unfathomable
secrets above her head.

The poet’s stanzas seemed actually to be trailing their black and golden vestments to the measure of “a defunctive music” whose full significance was deeper, wider, more beautiful, more tragic, than anything that was passing
between
those four walls.

Before the two hands of the clock had come together under the sign of twelve, Lexie had reached the “Threnos” of this mysterious Shakespearean psalmody:

Directly the clock began to strike they all lifted their eyes and remained motionless, staring at one another. There was a hush in the room when the thin reverberation died away, out of the heart of which it almost seemed as if they could hear the death rattle of some enormous winged creature, some huge space-moth, whose soft-feathered body was even then crumpling up, contorted and rigid, to sink down into the pools of Nothingness, a vast, lamentable, empty husk!

It was William Hastings who broke the silence.

“It’s curious to think,” he said, “that Time is a mere human invention, a mere illusion, without reality or substance
beyond
the fantastic and arbitrary interference of man.”

“Nonsense!” broke in Rook. “Time moves at a different
rate for different types of consciousness. But it isn’t an illusion. It’s the very essence of reality! It pours forth, like the water of life, from every shape and form into which Space is divided. You can’t think of Space without Time, but sometimes I almost feel as if I
could
think of Time without Space.”

“How
do
you think of Time, Rook?” enquired Lexie, anxious as he always was to encourage his taciturn brother to express himself.

“I think of it as a great gray Serpent, perpetually uncoiling itself from a pile of coils that has no end and no beginning.”

“You mean that it always comes round again, having swallowed its tail?” said Nell with a little self-conscious, youthful laugh at her own audacity.

“No, no—I don’t mean that at all. I mean that it just uncoils itself and goes off into darkness; scale after scale of gray silveriness; and then lost to sight! I can see those coils uncurling their endless length independently of Space altogether.”

William Hastings looked at him with the Weary indifference with which professional philosophers regard the utterances of ordinary persons.

“You can’t see
anything
without using both the great
illusions
, Ashover,” he remarked drily. “But I sympathize with you in your condemnation of Space. Space has
too
much
in
it.
But then, so has your Time! The whole
business
has gone too wide and far. The hour has struck for striking a blow at these miserable illusions, at this disgusting spectacle!”

He rose from the sofa as he spoke and began walking up and down the room. Lexie, who had been watching the face of Netta with a certain anxiety, left the mantelpiece and drew up a chair by her side, slipping his hand into hers as if to establish between them a warm human barrier against these desolate speculations.
“I tell you,” went on Hastings, “the time has come to unwind the clock, to unravel the woof!”

“Mr. Hastings has some very interesting thoughts,” said Cousin Ann, clipping her words like a youthful undergraduate anxious to prove his sobriety.

“Netta and I don’t know what the devil he’s talking about, do we, Netta?” put in Lexie. Netta made no answer. With a blank fatuous smile and wavering steps she moved across to the punch bowl and refilled her glass.

When she had reseated herself, Lexie once more possessed himself of her hand. He did this with a grave protective gesture while his corrugated, seamed, and leathery
countenance
, full of a formidable Cæsarean dignity, turned toward the excited ecclesiastic a quizzical and hostile eye.

“You mean, I suppose,” said Rook, filling his own glass again, while Nell watched him from her corner with big, infatuated eyes, “that your thoughts have hurt themselves against the ultimate walls; and you want a world without walls? You’d better wait for death, Hastings. That’s simpler than trying to change the universe.”

William Hastings paused in his monotonous walk and drummed with one of his hands on the table.

“Death is no good!” he shouted. “What we want is to stop death from breeding life! What we have to do is to go behind both life and death and get our hands on the
mainspring
.”

Netta began to laugh at this, an unpleasant tipsy laugh that drew Rook’s attention to her for the first time that night.

“What’s the matter, Netta?” he said brusquely. “Let her alone, Lexie.”

Netta’s laugh died away in a series of suppressed giggles.

“Let her alone yourself,” replied the younger Ashover, glancing almost angrily at his brother.

“Come and sit down again,” came in Nell’s faint voice from the corner of the room. It was difficult to decide
whether the young girl’s appeal referred to Rook or to her husband, or to both of them. Neither of the men, however, paid the least attention to her.

“What are you laughing at, Netta?” said Rook, standing in front of the unhappy woman and staring at her as if she had been an entire stranger to him.

A complicated expression, difficult to analyze, flitted across her face. There was in it the hunted look of an animal at bay. There was in it a sullen obstinate look, as of a child who is bent on mischief. And in addition to these things there was a curious coarsening process observable there, as if another Netta were dragging and tugging at her
consciousness
.

“I’ve—got—to—laugh,” she gasped out. “It’s—all—so funny!”

There was a dead silence in the room. Everyone looked at the two of them. Everyone seemed to be conscious, in a sudden suspension of all other interest, that a fatal and epoch-making event was taking place.

Lexie rose from his chair at her side and moved back again to the fireplace.

“What’s so funny? I don’t know what you mean,” said Rook sternly.

His voice seemed to come from such a region of cold, sober detachment that all the company, fuddled a little, as they all were, by the fumes of that silver bowl, experienced an
uncomfortable
and disturbing shock.

Rook had, as a matter of fact, drunk less than the rest; but, in any case, his tough, phlegmatic nature was not easily affected by liquor.

Netta stopped giggling and pointed at William Hastings, who now sat, gloomy and abstracted, on the sofa.

“He said the mainspring,” she cried huskily. “Yes, you did. You can’t deny it. You said the mainspring!”

Lexie intervened at this point.

“It’s one of his metaphysical symbols, Netta dear. He could easily have said gammon and spinach. It’s what these philosophers always do—use some havering jargon that might mean anything! You’re perfectly right, Netta. It’s the devil’s own silliness.”

“What do you say to
that
,
Hastings?” cried Rook, turning away from the bewildered face in front of him and glaring at the clergyman.

“I leave you to answer your little brother,” retorted the other.

“That’s not fair,” cried Cousin Ann in her rich flute-like voice. “Rook and Lexie are two different people. Aren’t you, Rook? You’re much nearer Mr. Hastings in your ideas. In fact, I’ve heard you say much the same sort of thing; only you never stay in the same mood long and you love contradicting yourself.”

She looked around as if seeking for corroboration of her words. Her eyes caught those of Nell fixed upon her with a sort of frightened wonder.

“You understand what I mean, don’t you, Nell?” she
murmured
.

“I certainly do,” cried the young girl in eager excitement, Her mouth quivering and her cheeks flushed. “I’ve always known that the real opposite to William was Lexie Ashover and not Rook Ashover.”

Netta’s voice at this point rang out thickly and
discordantly
.

“Opposite? Opposite? What do
you
know about Rook? Rook’s a deep one; that’s what Rook is—a deep one; and I’m the one to know it.”

Her tone had that peculiar emphasis in it of a tipsy person who grows quarrelsome.

“I’m not arguing with you, Netta dear,” cried Nell, rising from her seat and then sinking back again with a weary indecision. “I’m not arguing with her, am I, Rook?
Perhaps 
I’m stupid and childish, but I judge things differently than by just the words people say. And you
can
judge things like that, can’t you, Rook? Judge them by something in the air, I mean?”

She grew self-conscious and embarrassed when she felt the silence round her and the concentrated attention of the whole room. But her embarrassment only drove her on to further self-exposure.

“What I mean is this: There’s something hateful in William—something wicked and cruel—that wants to destroy things. Rook doesn’t want to destroy anything. He only wants to escape, to get away, to let everything go. Things are only half real to Rook; and people, too. They’re real to William; and that’s why he wants to blot them out.”

She stopped, trembling and exhausted, and gazed at Netta like a child begging for shelter and comfort. Netta nodded her head with solemn approbation.

“Half real,” she murmured. “Half real. That’s what it is! Isn’t she clever to have found that out about him? I never could have thought that out for myself.”

Lexie left the fireside where he had been silently listening to all this, and going to the window pulled the curtains back and pushed down the sash.

“Come and look here, Nell,” he said, almost commandingly. The girl cast a quick questioning look at her husband and at Rook and crossed the room to her host’s side.

“Have you ever seen that before?” Lexie said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The whole look of everything,” he replied ambiguously, taking her wrist and making her lean out of the window with him, while Cousin Ann with gestures of exaggerated chilliness threw an antimacassar round her shoulders and moved up close to William Hastings as if to include him in the
somewhat
perilous intimacy into which the company showed signs of drifting.

Nell was not long in realizing what Lexie meant. By reason of some peculiar thinness in the atmosphere, following upon the precipitation into glittering hoar frost of every particle of vapour, the stars shone down upon the earth with extraordinary brilliance. So brilliant were they, and so large and clear, that the most casual observer, that night, could hardly have failed to be reduced to some kind of amazement. The startling fact that these remote suns were not all of the same simple luminosity but were red and green and orange, and even faintly blue, gave to their
appearance
a palpable reality, brought their identity home to human senses as a measurable wonder, in a way that could never have happened if they had all of them been just
monotonous
points of shining whiteness.