Ducdame Read Free Page A

whispered Lexie. “What’s that? There’s no wind. There’s something alive up there.”
    They both listened intently but the sound was not repeated .
    “It’s queer to think of these women—Nell, Netta, Cousin Ann, and our mother—all lying in their beds in the moonlight and all agitated in some way over you.”
    “Damn you, Lexie! Why over me? Why the devil not over you? With all this refusing to do what Twickenham tells you and all this walking too far, there’s enough in your goings-on to keep every one of us awake at night.”
    He had hardly spoken the words when, with a wild tumbling of soft feathery wings, a couple of brown owls flew out of the headless tree. One flew straight across the water meadows ; while the other, swinging round and rising over the heads of the two men, vanished behind the masonry of the tower.
    “Netta is absurd about owls,” said Rook. “She says that she must have been a field mouse once and owls ate her. I tell her that she was much more likely a great stoat who ate little owls. What are you laughing at, you devil? I suppose you think Netta hasn’t the brain of a sparrow? And you think she can’t appreciate the country? And you think. I’m making an absolute idiot of myself by having her here?”
    “We needn’t go into all that now,” responded Lexie. “Have a cigarette?” And with a series of movements that were concentrated in their punctiliousness he proceeded to light a match.
    Rook shook his head. But he watched with curious interest the tiny Promethean flame lift up its eternal living protest between cold moonlight and cold mortality.
    They were both silent for a space. Then Lexie suddenly uttered the words: “The left side would be better than the right.”
    Rook stared blankly at the little rings of smoke that followed one another into the phantasmal air.
    “What on earth are you talking about? What left side?”
    Lexie deposited a carefully preserved ash end upon the stone between them, where the little gray heap lay undisturbed , like the excrement of a wandering moon moth.
    “Of the tree, brother Rook‚” he said, contorting the imperial ruggedness of his face into one of his humorous grimaces ; “of the tree. And don’t let the matter pass out of your forgetful mind! Mother’s sure to want to bury me over there by the old man. And I don’t want to be buried there. I want to be on the left side of the tree. Only for the Lord’s sake let me lie deep. You know what elms are! It’s one of those funny tricks of Nature; like the throats of whales. Monstrous trunks; and then silly little tendrils hardly bigger than turf-roots. I don’t want to be exposed, brother Rook. So get that fixed in your mind. The left side of the tree; and seven feet down!”
    The voice of the sick man died away into space; just as, a little while before, the fluttering of the owls had died away. Both sounds were now travelling, at a rate measurable to science, toward the moon. If the vibration of them survived the loss of the earth’s atmosphere it would soon be reaching a point from which, if sounds had sight, the other side of the moon would be visible!
    Some such fantasy as this passed obscurely through Rook’s mind as he delayed his response.
    In his abstracted fashion he sent his soul wandering over the wide expanse of water meadows, intersected by reedy ditches, which lay beyond the low wall of the churchyard.
    He could actually feel the chill of those cold fields, of those flooded ditches, as if his mind had the power of carrying his senses with it on such a voyage. He seemed to himself to become a moving nebulous shadow, acting as sentinel to the very floor of silence upon which the world is built.
    What he felt most conscious of at that moment was not the menace of mortality by which his brother was threatened ,but the indrawn breath of multitudes upon multitudes of grass blades, full of the pallid greenish sap of that late season‚ that seemed answering the attraction