Ducdame (36 page)

In the centre of this bridge the two brothers came to a pause, leaning against the railing and looking away over the barley fields, now a misty expanse of golden stubble, which sloped up toward Heron’s Ridge.

“Do you remember how we used to call this bridge ‘Foulden’s Bridge,’ for no reason except that we had a nursery-maid called ‘Foulden’ who used to meet that old villain Pod here of a fine summer’s evening?”

Lexie chuckled as he uttered these words with an unctuous comprehensive historic chuckle which “flew low,” so to speak, like a great flopping mallard, over all the days of all the years of both their lives!

Rook did not trouble himself to answer this particular remark. The two brothers were so content in each other’s society that they had a way of thinking aloud; each one pursuing his own deep-indented furrow of contemplation; quite satisfied if now and again these isolated trails crossed one another, like Lexie’s silvery snail tracks!

“I think the most delicious moments of my life,” said Rook dreamily, “if I put aside the very best of our excursions together, have come when I’ve been walking by myself
along some road I’ve never seen before. Are you listening, Lexie?”

His brother bent over the railing to watch the course of a bit of wood which he had flung into the water. He lifted up his head presently. “One minute!” he remarked. “Don’t forget what you were going to tell me; but I want to see”—and he flung another piece of wood after the first—“I want to see whether it’s Rook or Lexie who gets safe under the bridge!”

Rook leaned over the white-washed railing by his side. The Frome ran shallow and weedy just there. A few slender dace, with their heads upstream, were letting the current carry them languidly backward; while at the side of the river, where the water ran over clear sunlit pebbles, a great shoal of minnows were hovering and darting, like little tongues of quicksilver.

“There we go!” cried Lexie, giving his brother one of those looks of complicated naïveté and subtlety which always troubled Rook’s mind, as if with the tantalizing proximity of some dimension of human goodness and sweetness which was only offered to be snatched away. “There we go!” And he ran across “Foulden Bridge” to the other side. Rook followed him, puzzled at the eagerness with which he himself, too, awaited the issue of this childish contest.

“I’m out! I’m safe!” cried the younger Ashover, pointing with his stick. Then in a moment his face assumed a most curious mixture of condolence and triumph. “But you’re stuck fast under there! You’re done for, Rook!”

The elder man did at that second of time undergo an unusual and very unexpected sensation, a perfectly direct and unmitigated shock of self-pity, as if he had been suddenly condemned to leave a world full of beauty and happiness.

“Well? Shall we go on?” said Lexie. “I’m glad it was you and not I who sank, because that means that we
shall
be together this time next year.”

They moved on across the bridge. The road stretched straight in front of them with nothing but the small white square of Toll-Pike Cottage, far away on the left, to break its perspective till it lost itself in the dim autumnal blur, haze-wrapped and purple-shadowed, of Ashover village.

They moved very slowly now, arm-in-arm, scattering the dust with their feet. Each time they prodded the ground with their sticks little white clouds arose, that subsided patiently and sadly after they passed, like the sighs of
disappointed
watchers.

“What a place in the imagination,” said Rook suddenly, “has come to be taken by
dust.
Doesn’t it always return to your mind, that scene in Syria, when the Lord stopped and wrote in the dust?”

Lexie swung round. “You mean when He spat in the dust and made clay! It certainly is strange how every incident of that life falls in with the commonest omens of any walk you go. What were you just going to say on the bridge, Rook, when I interrupted you?”

The elder brother frowned. “Oh, nothing,” he said crossly; but after a pause and in an abstracted tone, “I was wanting to clear up a thing that’s always puzzled me. What is it you feel when you’re alone on a strange road, especially when it leads up over a bare hill? Do you suppose it’s an atavistic memory from times when people were more nomadic and more isolated than they are to-day? Or do you think that all the feelings of solitude, accumulated from many generations, are gathered up then; as if there were a person in each of us who was like a kind of Wandering Jew, with a consciousness entirely made up of the vague, faint, half-human impressions of loneliness, a person whose whole long mysterious life, reaching through many centuries, were one solitary journey?”

In place of answering him Lexie pulled him round by the arm and they stood for a while looking back. All the familiar
objects that they looked at then—the wooden bridge with its white palings, the dark-green alders by the sheep wash, the square tower of the church, the gray-stone bridge, the clump of thick-foliaged trees that hid Ashover House—all these things that each of them had known from childhood fell into a new and unfamiliar setting, as if they had been discovered off-guard, in some secretive mood that they had been at pains to conceal.

“Don’t you feel,” said Rook, “that we might be at this moment two characters in one of Grimms’ fairy stories? Haven’t you got that odd feeling, that you get in those stories, as if there were nothing really vulgar or banal in the whole world? As if we might see an old woman driving a goose over that first bridge and a man with a pack on his back crossing this second bridge, and every door in the village ready to open to the cooking of magic cakes and the purring of great wise all-knowing cats! It’s what comes from living in the same spot all one’s life and then suddenly seeing everything as if you’d never seen it before. The only way to escape from vulgarity and commonness is to live all one’s days in a place like Ashover.” He stopped and drew a long breath. “I don’t think I really should care very much,” he added, “if I should never go ten miles away from here until I died!”

They turned their faces once more toward the village and walked on together without further speech till they came to Toll-Pike Cottage.

Lexie’s anticipations were justified. They found Netta and Nell seated together in the little front garden. They were able to observe the two girls several seconds before they were themselves seen or heard owing to the muffling softness of the white dust and the fact that the women were engaged in an intimate and agitating conversation.

As the brothers watched them across the fence there came into Lexie’s mind that peculiar sense of the passing of time
which so often seized and arrested him. That he and Rook on this particular day of September should catch sight of those two, Nell in her white summer frock and Netta in black, talking so earnestly and anxiously, with the little round bed of red geraniums in front of them and the window of Hastings’s study open above their heads, seemed to be one of those events that, common enough in themselves, are yet pregnant in some peculiar way with an unforgettable significance.

“Rook is right,” thought Lexie, “about living in Ashover. It’s the fact of one’s knowing every stick and stone in the background of events that gives to events their heightened value. To get the passing of time one has to possess a dial‚ as it were, on which the hours are marked!” They opened the gate and entered the garden.

Lexie found it piquant to watch this meeting between Netta and his brother. “
There
are those two,” he thought, “solemnly shaking hands and gravely discussing some
indifferent
matter, when a year ago they were sharing the same room and using the same water jug.”

His thoughts were impinged upon by a very serious
communication
from Nell.

“We’re worried about William to-day,” she said. “He’s been writing at that book of his without cessation for the last twelve hours. He got up early this morning, before I was awake, and we haven’t been able to persuade him to come to any meals.”

“Has he eaten anything?” enquired Lexie.

“Hardly anything. I took him some milk and biscuits. He hasn’t locked the door. But when I go in he looks so wild and haggard and gets so angry at being disturbed that I daren’t stop more than a minute. I’m afraid for his mind if he goes on like this. He sat up till three or four this
morning
. He couldn’t have slept more than two hours. And I didn’t like what he said when I went in.”

“What did he say?”

“It was about Lady Ann and her child. It was awful, Lexie! I can’t think how a sane man can think such
appalling
thoughts. I don’t believe he
is
quite sane,” she breathed.

“Can you see him from here?” enquired Lexie, speaking in the tone he might have used if Hastings had been a dangerous otter or badger.

“No. You see? The window’s open but he’s got the blind down. Come here, Lexie. I don’t want Rook to hear us.” They moved away to the other side of the
geranium
bed.

“Netta, you can’t mean that you’re going back to London without letting me see you once more alone?” Rook spoke these words wistfully and pleadingly but there was an
undertone
of indignant sullenness in his voice and his eyes had an angry glint.

The girl’s face was very pale; a pallor which the golden September light clinging to her brown hair threw into
touching
relief. She seemed as Rook looked at her, standing there resolute and sad in her loose black dress, to be thinner and more girlish than in former times.

She was aware that his look had in it a recognition of her physical desirableness; the half-conscious non-mental renewal of an ancient magnetism. She knew that he was recalling with a certain tantalized sulkiness his former possession of her.

“I cannot bear it, Rook dear,” she said gently. “I could bear it if I didn’t love you. But I love you far too well. Don’t make it harder for me, Rook, than it is already!”

He glanced gloomily round; but Lexie and Nell had seated themselves on a wooden bench under the hedge, their eyes directed, not toward himself and Netta, but toward the window of Hastings’s room.

“Come into the house,” he said brusquely, taking her by the shoulder.

She felt so strong in her sadness and in her pity that she
allowed him to take her into Nell’s little parlour and shut the door upon them; but her instinctive response to the familiar touch of his hands surprised her by its independence of her conscious mind.

The very moment they were alone the room began to assume that cunning, furtive, pandar-like look that rooms take on when human skeletons of opposite sexes stand in one another’s presence, silent, obsessed, with beating pulses and hammering hearts! Rook’s eyes mechanically noted a grotesquely sentimental picture of Nell as a little girl which stood on the mantelpiece and then without regarding her feeble protests he took Netta in his arms.

Those two human bodies seemed to rush together in a strange complicity of contempt for what was happening to those minds or to those wills. The man pressed his mouth so savagely upon the girl’s mouth that before their kiss was over her lips had parted in helpless abandonment.

He had sworn in his anger that she was “like all women” and she knew in her heart that she had proved herself like many among them in the manner in which she yielded at that moment without really yielding at all She just let him do with her as he pleased because her body already belonged to his body and seemed to return to its possessor with the inevitableness of a compass needle. And yet not for one second did she deviate or collapse from her mental resolution.

As soon as he had removed his mouth from her mouth and had begun to kiss her chin and her neck, this unseduced spirit in her revolted and flung him off. He became suddenly conscious that he was holding a limp, cold, unresponsive husk in his arms, something whose essence was not there at all, a stiff, lifeless simulacrum of the real Netta. He let her sink down into Nell’s one available armchair, the very chair in which she had sat nearly a year ago, when on that day of torrential autumn rain she had come into the room with Cousin Ann.

“There … you see!” he gasped breathlessly. “All this mania of yours is just a morbid fancy that you’ve fallen into by living too much alone. You’re my same Netta … you’ll always be my Netta … nothing that can
possibly
happen can change that!”

An expression of pitiable sadness came into her face. She looked not only very pale but actually old and haggard at that moment. With the sunlight gone from her hair and her hair itself ruffled by their embrace the gray streaks in its heavy masses became lamentably apparent.

“When you say that it’s wrong for you to live with me any more, does that mean that you and I are to be as if we’d never lived as we have?”

She made an effort to answer him, but it was too much. Those big tears, the sight of which brought back the pathos of her personality more than anything else could have done, those tears as big as the eggs of golden-crested wrens, began one by one to run down her cheeks. She made no effort to dry them. She seemed unconscious of their presence. Nor did the lines of her countenance distort themselves as most people’s faces do when they cry. Her eyes remained wide open and fixed upon his own. Her mouth, too, remained strangely untremulous, its quiet curves set fast in an
expression
of weary composure.

Very slowly she shook her head; and then, after making some little swallowing movements in her throat, she spoke to him firmly and gently.

“I shall never love any one but you, Rook,” she said, “but I must go back where I came from. The Fathers have been very kind to me and they’ve found me work to do. I’ve got my life to lead somehow, Rook dear. And they’ve been very good to me. I owe them everything, everything!”

In her desire to explain she had touched just the one chord whose vibration was calculated to hurt him most.

“Everything, Netta?” he repeated with bitter sarcasm.
For it was just
that
,
that she should have turned in her despair to other comforters, to other responses, to a different refuge than anything he could supply which hit him to the depths of his nature.