Ducdame (8 page)

No plank! No dam! Only another black ditch still wider than the one he was following!

He had a queer horrid moment; caught there, by those two black ditches. The reeds had been dead and rotten for some time and their brown stalks stood up like twisted
feathers
from some obscene bird’s skull whose skeleton was mud-engulfed. One ditch was full of dead willow leaves. The other had a dead alder branch floating on its surface. And from both of them there emerged a heavy thick acrid odour that seemed as if it must be the very final exhalation of the dead flesh of a world.

Turning his heel in an angry desperation he caught sight of
a human figure emerging from the shadow of the church and moving hesitatingly among the graves.

His heart, in spite of himself, began to beat violently. She was earlier than he had expected!

Had there been some new trouble with that mad priest?

Well! Never mind the reason. She was there. And he quickened his steps to something approaching a run, fearful that she might take fright when she saw him and out of some crazy perversity elude him and vanish.

She gave no sign of retreating, however. She just
remained
passive—leaning against a tombstone; waiting for him. He scrambled over the low wall and strode straight up to her, holding his hat in his hand.

“I knew it was you,” she said simply; and made room for him at her side; so that he could lean also against the
monument
to “Timothy Edward Foraker, yeoman of this Parish.”

“I knew it was you,” she repeated, letting her fingers
remain
clasped in his as they stared together across the misty expanse.

Rook did not speak a word to her for several minutes. His soul seemed divided into three separate beings. One of these beings was obsessed with a simple concentrated desire to get hold of the inmost fluttering identity of this passive creature. To get hold of that—to take it for his own—to make it his unresisting, helpless, abandoned possession.

Another being in him was full of nervous considerations that were tremulous with a thousand fears, like the quivering antennæ of moths, the agitated feelers of sea anemones, the twitching nostrils of horses; considerations that included Netta, Cousin Ann, his mother—Nell herself.

But the third being in him just looked on, with absolute detachment and indifference, at the whole turbid stream of his life. It hovered over both their heads, this third being, and over the gravestone of Timothy Edward against which they leaned. It hovered over the ragged, mournful trunk of
Lexie’s elm tree. It voyaged out over the misty fens, over the gates and dams and poplars and ditches—over the rim of the horizon. And it was already out of its body, this third being, out of its malice-ridden, nerve-jangled body, drinking with deep, thirsty draughts the great calm under lake of hateless, loveless oblivion!

His first words to her came from the second being in him, the one with the twitching nostrils of a nervous animal. “Why did you come earlier than you said? It’s only
beginning
to get dark now.”

Even while he spoke, the first being in him was clutching her thin fingers more tightly, possessing itself of them more unscrupulously.

“Why didn’t I wait?” she murmured. “It wasn’t because I was in such a desperate hurry that I
couldn’t
wait, Rook. Was that what you were thinking?” And she turned her head toward him with a faint little-girl smile, answering the pressure of his fingers.

“No, Rook dear,” she went on. “It was because he
is
after all going to have vespers to-night. He told me
yesterday
he wasn’t; that he had something else to do; and that’s why I said to you to come to-night. But he
is.
So I came early; on the chance. I shall have to wait for him here,” she added. “He likes me to be in the church.”

Rook cast a slow, cautious glance toward the corner of the building. “But we’ve got a long time before vespers, haven’t we?” he said.

“About an hour, I should think.” And she, too, cast an anxious glance in the direction of the village. “Well, nearly an hour, anyway; but you’ll go when I tell you, Rook, won’t you? Sometimes I like to have you near me when I meet him. But not to-day. Oh, Rook! I saw Lexie this
morning
and he’s worrying about himself. He says this damp weather’ll kill him if it goes on. I thought he looked rather better, if anything. But he’s worrying.”

Rook dropped her hand and stood up. “Damn! I must go and see him,” he said. “I haven’t seen him for three days. I’ll go straight over there to-night.”

The girl got up, too. She felt only softly and gently sorry for Lexie. There was a queer exaltation in her that made it difficult to be more sorry than that for any one.

“He’ll outlive us all,” she said. “His mania for life is like the jump of that salmon trout I saw at Tollminster Mill. I told you about it. It jumped over the edge of the boat. It jumped over everything. And it got back, too, into the mill pond.”

For some reason or other it gave Nell a peculiar satisfaction to think of Lexie as a silvery salmon jumping for his life. She felt that she would like to hold that struggling, arrowy, smooth-scaled fish tightly in her hand before seeing it go splashing back.

She became quiet and still, thinking of Lexie in this way; but in the end she wanted to stop thinking of him; for she suddenly recalled the particular look in the eyes of the animal in her childhood’s Bible, entitled: “The Ram caught by its Horns.” No fish, even with hooked gills, even with the tragic eye-sockets of the Dolphins of Scopas, could ever feel quite what that beast felt; and if a man felt more——

She found herself being led by Rook to the door of the church. The sun had been invisible for some time past; and now the whole scene was losing its distinctness, losing its familiar landmarks one by one as the night fell.

Gloom that drew its quality from dampness, a positive thing, was rapidly being replaced by gloom that drew its quality from darkness, a negative thing.

Rook pushed open the door of the church and drew her inside. It was like night within the building, a night that was faintly touched by a pallid greenish luminousness that seemed to have no connection with sun or moon.

As the heavy door closed behind them the girl felt she had
passed into a different world, a world smelling of some sort of chilly-fleshed fungous growths that had taken centuries to mature.

Rook took her by the hand and led her up the narrow aisle, past the brass lectern, under the Norman archway, to where the tombs of the Ashovers of old days lay in their pallid immobility. Standing behind her, while her knees touched the sleeping Crusader, he took her in his arms and kissed her cold cheek. Letting her head sink back and turning her face sideways she met his lips, while her slender body yielded itself to him.

She felt strangely and profoundly happy in his embrace. It was a different kind of happiness altogether from what she felt when Lexie kissed her on the day she had fled from her home. She had had Rook on her mind then, so that she could not lie back content upon the dark flood; but it was Rook himself whose desire was that flood now, and her whole nature was free to respond.

A queer remembrance came into her mind as she yielded to his caresses, the remembrance of a salt marsh by the Dorset coast, where the greenish-white light of a protracted sunset hung like livid phosphorus in the black pools, stained with pale blood. She remembered how a solitary heron with
wide-stretched
wings and trailing legs had descended into the water; and how she had felt that it was those livid pools in the black earth, rather than the darkened sky overhead, that offered an escape to her soul.

Here in the church with the man she loved she felt as if she were hidden safe away from all responsibility, from all
pursuit
. She felt as long as she could keep his desire
concentrated
upon her, that Time itself stood still; and a lovely, deep, enchanted Eternity substituted itself for the little poisonous rankling minutes that throbbed like evil ulcers.

Rook’s mind also had its own obscure journeys to make. He was aware—as she never for a moment seemed to be—
of the presence of his dead people. He was aware of an angry menace rising from all that human dust under his feet, threatening him if he did not open the gates of the future to their race, cursing him if he barred and locked those gates in the selfish enjoyment of uncreative, unproductive emotion.

As he caressed her there in that dark church on that curious day he felt as though he were inflicting a definite wound upon the accumulated yearning, the gathered tension, stretching out into the future, of six long human centuries.

So many fathers begetting so many children; so many children begetting so many fathers; and all to end in his striking them back into the annihilating dark, with a mocking “Down, wantons, down!”

It was as if all the life energy of all that proud human tribe had been concentrated in one invisible gesture of intense creation, only to be derided, jeered at, spurned, by his
flippant
indifference.

Indifference? It was defiance; since he had chosen their very resting place to flaunt his sterile malice. Into this very shrine of their vitality, of their hope, of their unconquerable life urge he had come to parade his disillusionment, his
alliance
with emptiness, with nothingness, with the eternal
No
of the abyss!

He had come to fool them. How did the sentinel Crusader know that this girl he had brought with him was inhibited and disallowed; a mocking mirage to their hope? He had come to fool them. So at least that smirking infidel of a great-grandfather Benjamin seemed to guess as he leered at them over the plump cupids.

For it was against the very monument of the crafty Deist that the two were leaning now; and, as they clung together there, Rook felt he was taking a kind of revenge on fate itself.

He was certainly revenging himself upon the life lust of his own race. He was denying that race any future at all. He
was saying to the vast dim company of future Ashovers, “Ye shall not live!”

It was a feeling of this kind, deep, cold, malicious, that made every caress he gave this girl a kind of flouting of the gods. Each kiss was a malignant sacrilege directed against the helpless invisible company of the Future.

He had decided to cut the living navel cord between these two. Let the one be totally forgotten! Let the other never be born!

Something of the viciousness of these thoughts must have passed into the very touch of his hands; but if it did, the girl neither regarded it nor was affected by it.

Rook was startled—as if it were something upon which he had not calculated—when he became aware of the spiritual exaltation of his companion.

The girl’s white features, as he caught a glimpse of them in that spectral light, wore an expression of childlike beatitude. He knew there had been a mysterious attraction of some kind between himself and this woebegone little creature; but when he saw that illuminated look on her face, endowing her with an utterly unexpected beauty, he was conscious of a sharp secret pang, as if his nature had suddenly touched some “fourth dimension” whose superiority to his own level of existence shocked and troubled him.

Many months after this he remembered what he felt at that moment, when that white face swirled up to him as if on the crest of a dark wave, looking at him and through him and past him in an ecstasy of which he himself touched barely the fringe.

It was certainly in league with the nerves of women, the peculiar atmosphere of that December day.

Whether it was in league with the remorseless umbilical cord of those insistent generations was a different matter. Rook Ashover had only commenced his fatal struggle with
that
dark mandate!

The two companions found themselves back again at the door at last; the man troubled, anxious, perturbed, his mind abnormally alert to every shape and sound of the external world; the girl drugged, dazed, numbed, but unfathomably happy.

“It’s like death to make love to you,” he muttered when they were out of the church.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I felt like that, too.”

She lied with an entranced luxuriousness, careless of what he said or what she answered.

“I shall wait for William now without minding a bit,” she added. “You go off quickly, Rook. No! No! No good-byes! I’ll go back and light all the candles! You look when you get to the bridge and see if the windows aren’t lit up! When you hear him ringing the bell you may think of me saying my prayers by those tombs! There! Go off quick—— No! No! I won’t say any good-bye!”

Rook did turn round when he reached the bridge; and sure enough, the windows were lighted up as he had never seen them lighted up before. It was a sort of heathen Candlemas; a twilight celebration of the tutelary Powers of that riverside, as they reassumed, with the fall of darkness, their ancestral domination.

The smell of the water washing against the mossy arches, the smell of the black mud in the banked-up ditches, the smell of miles and miles of damp grass sinking down, blade by misty blade, under the weight of the night, flowed like a palpable exhalation around the yellowish gleam of those Gothic windows.

He leaned against the parapet and listened intently. The air about him seemed supernaturally hushed; all the great gulfs of the night listening there, even as he was listening.

And then in a moment, with a suddenness that made Rook gasp, for he had heard no footstep upon the road, the great cracked reverberating bell rang out from the church tower.

Toom! Toom! Toom!

The very cattle and sheep must have stirred uneasily in their sheds and bartons. It was as if that heathen
illumination
had actually summoned forth out of the air the tangible presence of something that had been gathering upon Ashover since the dawn of the day.

Toom! Toom! Toom!

It was as if the gigantic feet of Cybele herself,
Magna
Mater,
Bona
Dea
,
were striding bronze-sandalled over the dark bedrock of Frome-side.