Ducdame (44 page)

Lexie led Nell to the rear of a little crowd of wind-blown spectators who were standing at the entrance to the tent.

“It’s late in the year, isn’t it, for this kind of thing?” he remarked to a sturdily built stranger who was bending over one of the tent pegs, making the rope more secure.

“Late? I should think it was late,” replied the man in a surly tone. Then, when he took in the personality of Lexie: “We’re due in Bishop’s Forley to-night, sir,” he added, “and we stay there for the winter. I said myself ’twere a fool thing to stop here with the weather so had; but he
would
have it so; and so here we are!”

“I’ve never known a merry-go-round in Ashover later than October,” repeated Lexie gravely, moving forward with Nell into the tent.

The engine happened to stop at that moment, and as the boys and girls who had been riding clambered down, and
another instalment prepared to mount, a quick whisper ran round among them and many eyes were turned upon the couple.

Nell pulled him by the arm. “Let’s get away,” she whispered. “They’re noticing us.”

But it chanced that a particularly grotesque piebald horse had stopped just in front of Lexie. This horse possessed an unscrupulous and world-embracing eye, an eye upon whose yellow-tinted orb the flame of the naphtha lamps shone luridly, giving it an almost Cyclopean look.

“One minute!” the young man said. And leaving his companion standing there alone, white-faced and
disconcerted
, he climbed up with careful deliberation upon the animal’s back.

The music soon recommenced; and the fantastic circle of horses and riders revolved once more, to a pandemonium of raucous sounds.

“Looksee! Looksee!” cried one of the children. “There be Master Lexie, a-ride-a-cock-horsin’ same as we!”

Nell, in her black dress and black hat, was the cynosure of many astonished eyes. She knew them all, but she carefully avoided meeting the glance of any one in particular. Na one in the tent was bold enough to address her; the older people moving discreetly away to the farther side of the engine, the children crowding up as near to her as they dared but only whispering to each other in low tones that were drowned in the noise of the brazen din.

She herself stared helplessly at Lexie’s figure, in its frayed overcoat and blue muffler, appearing and disappearing with punctual regularity, like some sign of the Zodiac in a
clock-work
heaven.

The piebald horse he rode lost most of its individual character in that whirling revolution; but Nell could still catch the staring voracity of its insatiable eye, an eye that remained fixed upon her with an expression that was neither
sympathetic
nor derisive; an expression of simple devouring interest.

As to Lexie himself, his own lineaments were composed into a fixed and smiling mask of infantile complacence. One of his eyelids was lifted a little higher than the other in a kind of ecstasy of ironic roguery; but the glance he directed toward his companion as
he passed her by in his gyrations had in it a sublime acceptance of destiny worthy of the animal on whose back he rode.

The noise in the young man’s ears was deafening; and as he listened to it, giving himself up to the motion, his mind began wandering off to other sounds of a less artificial
character
that were at that moment rising up toward the
cloud-covered
sky from his native Frome-side.

He thought of the way the branches were creaking even now among the Scotch firs on Heron’s Ridge. He imagined the grunt of a badger as it trotted in the moaning wind across Titty’s Ring. He heard the cattle stirring drowsily in their bartons. He heard the splash of a perch in Saunders’ Hole and the cry of a stray mallard drifting across the marshes toward Comber’s End. Out of the heart of that brazen clamour he seemed to be listening to the tiny German clock ticking the hour in his mother’s bedroom. He even fancied he could hear the quiet breathing in its guarded cradle of the small head of his House, the young new Squire of Ashover. And then suddenly, as in his fantasy he counted up these unnoticed sounds of the night, it seemed to him that he could actually catch the whirring of owl wings hovering about his elm tree in the churchyard, as they had done in the moonlight, just a year ago, when he met his brother at that place.

Before the music stopped or the rotation of the wheel of horses and riders came to a standstill, Lexie jumped down on the ground by Nell’s side. He took her by the arm and led her out of the tent where they were met in the darkness by that familiar smell of an enclosure of grass trodden by men and beasts, the precise savour of which none know who
have not been to fairs and circuses in country villages.

“The hobbyhorse is forgot!” he muttered; and the girl was bewildered by the fierce intensity of his grip upon her arm. The wind seemed to blow against his face at that moment with an ice-cold menace, as of some breath from the outer spaces. He gathered his forces together to resist this threat; and instinctively, in so doing, he let his arm in the darkness enclose Nell’s waist.

“Don’t let’s go back just yet,” he pleaded. “Netta won’t mind waiting a little for supper.”

The girl was so startled and shocked by the change in his manner as they came out of the tent that, in her pity for him, she did not have the heart to resist. But the touch of her warm young body, as he pressed her against him, soon
restored
him.

He led her down a grassy rain-soaked lane; one of those lanes on the outskirts of a village that usually end in nothing more hospitable than some isolated group of cattle sheds or pigsties.

What in this case they stumbled upon, however, was an open barn; and Lexie was enchanted beyond measure to detect in its cavernous obscurity a mass of sweet-smelling piled-up hay.

But Nell hesitated now and drew back when, with an exclamation of unashamed delight, he pulled at her hand to lead her forward into this shrine of Demeter.

“Let’s go home, Lexie,” she begged. “My shoes and stockings are soaking, and I’m sure yours must be! We really oughtn’t to keep Netta waiting any longer.”

But it was not easy to resist the wistful and humorous appeals, some of them almost querulous in their childishness, with which he implored her; and she yielded at last.

From outside in the darkness they could hear the shrieks and snorts of the merry-go-round and the wild music of a country jig that might have been the very tune to which the
West Saxons first invaded Frome-side, so heathen and
barbaric
did it sound.

Neither of them could have told how long they were there together, with that sweet penetrating smell of the hay about them, and the scent of the dark, rain-drenched fields blown in through the door. But when they stood at last on the threshold of their hiding place, and while Lexie’s countenance was illuminated for a moment by the light of the match with which he lit a cigarette, Nell noticed to her consternation a look upon his face like the look of a child outraged and lost.

“What is it, Lexie?” she asked anxiously.

But he threw the match away without answering. His mind, like a blind home-turning mole whose moving tunnel escapes all prevention, though its course can be traced by the upheaved turf, reverted to that six-foot-deep hole in the churchyard.

“Come along,” he said brusquely; but a minute later, offering her his arm to lean upon, “I do hope you won’t be the worse for this, Nell. It would be a shame if you were; for you’re a brave and generous little girl. Do your feet feel
very
wet? If they don’t
feel
wet I expect you’ll get no harm.”

This time it was the girl who made no answer. When they reached the field where the tent had been, they found the showmen in the process of packing up and departing. The wind made the lamps by which they laboured flare and smoke like the fires of some wild bivouac; and the figures of the men, showing dark and sinister in the tossing shadows, seemed as alien to the hedges and gates and trees as if they had been brought there by evil wizardry.

There was a group of two or three farm lads still lingering about the show wagons; and when Lexie and Nell had passed they heard behind them shouts of ribald laughter. Lexie felt his companion’s hand tremble on his arm and a wave of
anger, out of all proportion to the incident, passed through his frame.

“What brutes they are!” he muttered aloud.

And then in his secret thoughts he lamented the
innumerable
obstacles and difficulties by which the simplest and most natural attempts to be just ordinarily happy are surrounded and hemmed in.

“Something has given this human society a twist in the wrong direction,” he said to himself. And even as he said it a shameful subterranean thankfulness that it was not he who was lying in that six-foot hole took possession of him.

“Nell, my dear, you’re not angry with me, are you?”

She pressed his arm gently; and the wordless tenderness of that response touched him more than any words could have done.

“How sweet and lovely a girl can be!” he thought; and then in a kind of inward ecstasy, “I am alive! I am alive!” he cried to his own heart.

But a moment later, quite unknown to the girl at his side, “the form,” to use a biblical phrase, “of his visage” changed. “Oh, Rook! Oh, my brother, my brother!”

Nell never quite understood why it was that just then he stopped dead still in the road and dropped the arm that was supporting her.

But he had gone down in his remorse among those who “lie in hell like sheep.” He, the life amorist, the worshipper of the sun and the sweet air and the grain-bearing earth, was up to his knees at that moment in waters deeper and colder than the waters of the Frome.

But even there, though his face in the darkness had the injured, bewildered look of an outraged child, he held the dead man tightly, protectively against his heart. He did not budge an inch from the integrity of his nature. But his love, like a spear driven into the bed of a swollen river, stood up erect and defiant, visible through the driving mist to all such
as might come that way, a signpost in the night, a signal, a token, a witness that would at least outlast his own days, even though it did not outlast the Scotch firs on Heron’s Ridge or the linden tree and the cedar tree on the lawn of Ashover House.

THE END

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) was born in Derbyshire, brought up in the West Country (the Somerset–Dorset border area was to have a lasting influence on him), went to Cambridge University and then became a teacher and lecturer mainly in the USA where he lived for about thirty years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his long life. In addition to his
Autobiography
his masterpieces are considered to be
Wolf Solent, Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands
and
Porius
. But his lesser, or less well-known, works shouldn’t be overlooked, they spring from the same weird, mystical, brilliant and obsessive imagination.