Ducdame by John Cowper Powys Page A

Rook’s personality had certainly hovered over their tea table, but neither of them was at all anxious for the intrusion of his actual presence at that juncture.
    The situation was indeed, for one second, humorously disconcerting; one of those situations with which the clumsy gaucherie of men copes more easily than the finesse of women.
    But Lady Ann kept her head, and soon proved herself a true daughter of the diplomatic Lord Poynings.
    Without the flicker of an eyelid to indicate that she knew that both of them had heard those steps: “There’s Lion!” she cried. “I’m sure he’s dying for a run on Battlefield. Good-bye, Auntie! I’ve enjoyed my tea so much!”
    The door was hardly shut behind her when Mrs. Ashover hurried to the window. There he was—her son the Squire—pacing abstractedly up and down, as if the little gravel path were the wall of a fortress.
    Presently she heard the voice of Cousin Ann, a clear careless young girl’s voice, calling: “Lion! Lion! Lion!” Apparently Rook Ashover also heard that voice; for he stopped suddenly in his abstracted walk, stood hesitating fora moment, looking nervously toward the sound; and then with a quick furtive stride and without so much as once glancing behind him, made off in the direction of the Frome bridge.
    “Why doesn’t she run after him?”cried the old lady in her indignant heart, tapping the window sill with her knuckles.
    “Lion! Lion! Lion!” came the girlish voice from the stable yard.
    “You fool! He’s across the bridge! You stupid! He’s across the river!” And the belligerent little woman positively shook the window frame in her impetuous annoyance.
    Rook was across the river. He was not only across the river but he was also—very soon—across the churchyard and out into the water meadows behind it. He felt such an intense desire for movement, for action, for self-escape.
    No doubt the peculiar quality of that pacing up and down the gravel path had been the outward sign of the rending and tearing within him of two opposite motive forces.
    He had made a sort of half-appointment to meet Nell Hastings that afternoon; but something in Netta’s mood, something illuminated, magnetic, had made him feel uneasy and perplexed.
    Netta had seemed to escape him as she never had escaped him. She seemed to have acquired some mysterious independence . She had spoken to him and looked at him in such a strange, remote, exultant way! He felt piqued and confused. He found himself half-wishing that he hadn’t made this appointment with Nell.
    Rook did not realize how deeply the great goddess Artemis—the mysterious immortal whose love is for her own body—had come into her own that day. He did not realize that it was a day for the triumph of woman’s nerves over man’s nerves. On such a day, he ought to have told himself, had the dangerous thyrsus-bearing son of Semele come stealthilyinto the city of Pentheus. On such a day had the wild Bassarids and Mænads sent the gory head of Orpheus “down the swift Hebrus, to the Lesbian shore”! On such a day had the dogs and maidens of Diana torn the luckless Actæon limb from limb. It was a woman’s day; a day that lay virginal, inscrutable, relaxed; yet with a magnetism in its inertness that could trouble a man’s deepest soul.
    And Rook Ashover hated the day. He felt a queer, nervous , reluctant uneasiness even about meeting Nell. He would have given anything for a hard, nipping black frost to get its grip upon these misty meadows, to turn all this clinging earth-flesh into frozen rock! He loathed the sodden, relaxed clay with its incense-reek of insidious mortality. He longed to escape from it all, into some clear, purged, bitter air. He felt homesick for the tang of the salt, unharvested, unfecund sea.
    Blindly striding across the meadows—full of whirling, contradictory thoughts—he was suddenly brought to a standstill by a wide black ditch.
    “Double-dyed ass! Of course there’s no path over