Ducdame (13 page)

“You’re not very polite, Rook,” said Cousin Ann. “I expect that what you’ve really got in your mind is a jug of
Mrs. Drool’s ale. I expect he intends to lunch better than any of us. Don’t you think so, Netta?”

Netta looked wearily from one to the other. She had not missed the glance that passed between them at the allusion to the ale.

“And what are you two going to do with yourselves this gray day? You’re both so amiable that the only difficulty will be to find out what the other really wants!”

“Oh, we shall get on, sha’n’t we, Netta?” said Cousin Ann, slipping her hand over the other’s wrist.

Netta felt a wild plebeian desire to slap the handsome girl’s face, but her shame at her own impulse gave her answer its appropriate lightness.

“Of course we shall, Rook. You needn’t think that we can’t get on without a man to amuse us, even though it
is
New Year’s Eve!”

Rook looked at them, standing together there, and a sort of baffled moroseness took possession of him. What was this power in women that enabled them to carry things off with such disconcerting indifference? What was this mental fluidity that enabled them to enter into some strange subconscious alliance with one another from which a man was ejected like an alien, like a stranger?

With each of these two alone he had felt the thrill of
possession
. But now that they were together, he felt as if
all
that
must have been an arrogant hallucination! He hated to see them together. It substituted femininity in the
abstract
—a thing he found almost repulsive—for the individual clinging arms which could carry him out of himself!

He moved off to the door into the kitchen, sulky and
baffled
.

“Well! Good-bye, till we meet at Lexie’s!” he said, opening the door and sweeping them together in one weary dismissing gesture. “I hope Mrs. Bellamy mixes the punch as well as she did last New Year’s Eve!”

Before that day was over there was a distinct alteration in the drab colourlessness of the weather. Little by little the puddles in the roads turned into cat’s-ice. A faint film of solidification formed over the ponds at the meadow corners. Hieroglyphic patterns made themselves visible in the mud of secluded lanes. Wrinkled crisscross imprints appeared on the top of the new molehills, imprints made by lighter touches than the feet of mice or birds or the trail of worm or snail.

Dead leaves that had lain softly one upon another in the mouths of old enmossed fox holes or under clumps of fungi at the edges of woods were now soldered together, as if by tinkling metal, with a thin filigree of crisp white substance. The wet vapour distillations clinging to the yellow reeds down by the ditches began to transform themselves into minute icicles. Birds that had reassumed their natural thinness fluffed out their feathers again as they hopped about searching for sheltered roosting places. In every direction there were tiny rustlings and tightenings and crackings as the crust of the planet yielded to the windless constriction, crisp and crystalline, of a gathering hoar frost.

Nell Hastings had procured a young girl from the village to help her to make her preparations. She herself set the table for her little party; arranged the fruit and the nuts and the sweets; and even lit the four red candles half an hour before the time for the appearance of her guests.

When all was ready below stairs and she had placed her villager as sentinel over the various pots and pans in the kitchen, she ran up to her room to change her dress.

She found her husband seated on their bed, in his trousers and vest, struggling with an immaculate evening shirt. He had brushed his hair so carefully and was taking so much trouble with his clothes that for one moment Nell was aware of a wave of tenderness toward him. His profile, as she watched it furtively in the mirror, had really a certain
Napoleonic 
majesty; and the naïve solemnity of his struggle with his evening clothes touched that particular chord in her woman’s nature which must have responded to just such childish self-ornamentation of the preoccupied male for
thousands
and thousands of years.

She left the brushing of her own hair for a minute or two to hover over him with bare arms, her proffered assistance being itself a kind of subtle caress.

And woman-like she was not content to let this interlude just pass for what it was. She must needs exploit it. When they were both ready to go down she suddenly took his head in her hands and kissed him on the forehead.

“You see how happy we are now?” she said; “and how everything is all right again? That’s because you’ve stopped writing that terrible book. Don’t write it any more,
William
! I beg you! See, I beg you on my knees, in my best white dress, not to write another word of it!”

She actually did sink on her knees before him, clinging to the front of his coat and throwing back her head.

He could not have known, had he been as wise as Hermes Trismegistus, that the caressing abandonment of this gesture—apparently directed toward himself alone, and isolating the two of them from all the world by a sort of magical circle—was in reality entirely due to the girl’s happy
knowledge
that she was going to see Rook Ashover that night. The power that all human nature has, of exploiting secret emotions in the interest of obvious emotions, is carried by women to a most delicate and extravagant excess. Even as she knelt before him with her head thrown back looking so provocatively and wistfully appealing, she was thinking of him and of his book with less than half her mind.

Had William Hastings possessed the cosmic clairvoyance of a Paracelsus he might still have been unable to fathom the motives of this thin figure, with bare shoulders, clinging so beseechingly to the buttons of his coat.

As a matter of fact, he made not the slightest attempt to fathom them. He replied to the unfairness of her woman’s weapon by the unfairness of his man’s weapon. He just pulled her up by physical force, and holding her more tightly and with more vicious concentration than he had done for many a long month, he took advantage of her instinctive, nervous yielding to snatch a moment of blind love-making, such as he might have snatched had they been complete strangers to each other.

The man had really been as much betrayed into their luckless marriage as had the girl. He had met her at her aunt’s, an old priest-ridden fanatic, who at once set herself to curry favour with Eternity by handing over to its
representative
, as a menaced city might hand over its fairest virgin to a sea monster, the body and soul of her niece.

The girl had amused him at first, both by her idealizing devotion and by her neurotic moods. To the former he had responded by an attenuated strain of absentminded tenderness; to the latter he had responded by an ironic indulgence, as if her girlish perversities and caprices were the gambols of a half-human kitten.

It was not until her moods, her fits of crying, her childish obstinacies, her cravings for romance, had thoroughly wearied him and got on his nerves that he began to treat her with a studied callousness, hardening his heart against her, in an unphilosophic anger with her, for having ever crossed the threshold of his monastic cell.

It was a shock to the girl from which only her encounter with Rook saved her, when she first realized how little of natural warmth there was in the awkward tenderness which was Hastings’s nearest approach to human passion; but even this new feeling, so satisfying to her suppressed craving for romance, did not obliterate the disastrous effect of that first revelation of what the sex instinct can sink into, in a personality dominated by the tyranny of thought.

It did make her cling, however, with a desperate and pathetic tenacity, to whatever romantic elements there were—and there were not many—in Rook’s response to her
infatuation
. It was doubtless the fact that what the girl had so far never encountered, either in Hastings or in Rook, was just warm natural human amorousness that led to the contentment and complaisance with which she had received the shameless advances of the invalid Lexie. Lexie, with whom she had no responsible link of any kind, seemed the only one whose erotic proclivities left behind them no poison, no sting, no regret.

The ill-timed embrace between these two remote and alien human beings was interrupted by the sound of the door bell. They pulled themselves together at once, the girl smiling, the man grave, and after opening the door and listening for a moment to the colloquy below, they went downstairs side by

It was a wonder to watch Nell’s little villager in cap and apron assume the airs of an experienced servant as she
informed
Cousin Ann and Netta that “Mrs. Hastings be
expecting
their ladyships; and please would they take off their cloaks and go straight into parlour.”

Nell’s dinner party, when it was once under way, proved successful beyond her utmost expectation. The thought that when it was over she was going to Lexie’s to meet Rook gave animation and freedom to her chatter and something almost approaching loveliness to her thin face.

William Hastings, too, was in excellent spirits, and all went smoothly till the time came for the sweets and nuts.

Perhaps it was a glass of the Vicar’s port wine that broke the spell and put mischief into the heart of Cousin Ann; for the little servant had scarcely retired to begin washing the dishes when that young woman said, turning to her host: “Have you got yet to the really exciting part of your book, Mr. Hastings?”

The look which the author of the work in question turned upon his guest startled even the daughter of Lord Poynings. It must have resembled the look with which the famous Dean Swift actually killed the unfortunate Vanessa.

“Has my wife been talking to you?” he asked in a tone that made Nell wish the ceiling would fall down on their heads. “Have you,” he went on, “got the slightest idea of what my book means?”

“Means?” stammered Cousin Ann. “I understood you to imply that it was slightly heretical. But beyond that—I—I have no notion, of course. I’ve never heard you read a line of it!”

The countenance of Mr. Hastings expressed the passing within him of a terrific struggle. The veins in the man’s neck stood out like whipcord. Beads of perspiration
appeared
on his forehead. His cheeks grew flushed and then very pale. His fingers, which were playing with the blade of a silver fruit knife, bent it back until it looked as though it would snap. He remained as if petrified in his seat; breathing heavily, like a person on the verge of some kind of fit.

The three women stared at him in dead silence. They all seemed to recognize that a chance spark might set off a terrific explosion. But, in their silence, their own whirling thoughts must have resembled, for any occult initiate, three differently coloured lighthouses, projecting upon a mysterious storm their divergent rays!

The enormous magnetism of the man, in the turmoil of his suppressed fury, stirred up all manner of latent emotions in these three feminine bosoms.

Cousin Ann thought to herself that if she
were
destined to conceive a child for Rook, she must be careful to avoid the risk of any more shocks of this kind.

Nell thought to herself how odd it was that when William’s madness was directed toward others instead of toward her,
she felt a queer perverted pride in him and even sympathy for him.

Netta was swept out, beyond the little room, beyond the four candles, beyond the convulsed countenance of the man opposite, into the bleak country of her own bitter resolution. “I’ll do it to-night,” she thought. “I’ll drink to-night at Lexie’s all I can, so that he won’t be able to bear the sight of me when he comes!”

William Hastings rose from the table. He had got his emotion into control, and he held it down within him as a man holds a maddened horse with an iron bit.

“Well, young ladies,” he said with a benevolent smile, “I expect we’d better start, if we’re not going to disturb Mrs. Bellamy’s arrangements.”

A quarter of an hour later they were all four entering the village. The lamps from the cottage windows shone out upon the littered yards, with their pails and wood piles and pig troughs and chicken pens; out upon the disconsolate vegetable patches where forlorn potato stumps and
melancholy
cabbage stalks carried the crisp whiteness of the
beginnings
of a heavy hoar frost.

As they turned into the alley where Lexie’s cottage stood, they could see, at the end of the narrow lane, the
dark-stretching
expanse of the water meadows.

“There’s a new moon this evening,” said Mr. Hastings. “I shouldn’t be surprised if we could see it from the end of the lane. It may be behind the house at this moment.”

“Let’s go and see,” cried Cousin Ann.

“No, no,” said Nell. “We’re late already. Mrs. Bellamy begged me not to be late.”

“It’s no distance,” protested the other, “and it would be so wonderful to see it over the ditches! Let’s go, Mr. Hastings!”

“You go in with Miss Page, then, Nell,” said Hastings.
“Lady Ann and I won’t be five minutes. You can tell them we are just coming.”

The young girl obeyed with alacrity. She felt in a state of complete psychic sympathy with Netta and it was more than she had dared to hope for to meet Rook without either her husband or Cousin Ann!

These two unwanted ones walked rapidly together down to the end of the little road.

In a softer humour than usual, because of the pressure upon mind and body of the oldest interrogation-mark in the world, Cousin Ann was less oblivious than might have been expected to the recondite magic of that place and that hour.

The dark flat surface of a tall house by the edge of the fields rose above them like the bastion of an ancient city. Perhaps just because she felt herself at that moment on the verge of becoming a living bridge by which the Past might go over into the Future, she experienced the feeling that long ago, and even many times, she had come to a road’s end like this, where was just such a dark-walled house, and just such a smell of muddy, reedy fens stretching away under the burden of hoar frost!