“I’m glad we came, aren’t you?” the girl whispered, aware of a great leap of power and strength in the very depths of her being. “You thought of coming, though. I should never have done it alone.”
She laid the tips of her fingers on her companion’s sleeve, and the effect of this slight contact was enough to enhance to a point of magnetic intimacy her feeling of power.
“Tell me, now, will you; now we’re alone here, what you really are saying in that book?”
William Hastings swung round as quickly as if he had been struck by an invisible arrow.
“What’s that?” he cried hoarsely. “Leave that, please, Lady Ann Poynings!”
But the girl watched the horned and crescented mystery, cutting its path through the clouds, like a fairy scimitar through a froth of soapsuds, and she remorselessly went on.
“Why should I leave that, William Hastings? I’m intelligent enough to know that what you’re doing is no trifle, is perhaps of the greatest importance to us all.”
“No trifle and of great importance!” he repeated mockingly. But she could see he was yielding a little, and she laid her hand again on his coat sleeve.
“Do tell me! Do take me into your confidence!”
He was evidently impressed by her words. He looked round furtively as if to make sure there was no one within hearing.
“May I ask you a question, Lady Ann?” he said.
Cousin Ann smiled in the darkness. “Why not? Especially since I’m asking you such terrific impertinences!”
“Well, then, would you be good enough to tell me what is your motive for going on living in this disgusting world?”
“You mean for not committing suicide?”
“Not at all! I mean for wishing your life to continue; for wishing the life of the world to continue; for wishing that life as life should conquer death as death.”
“But it never can completely conquer death, can it?”
It was his turn now to snatch hold of her wrist in the darkness.
“Never completely. No; never completely! But it can conquer it very far. It can conquer it so far as to encourage men, beasts, birds, fishes, to go on with the huge stupidity! It can conquer it so far as to encourage intelligent women still to persist in bearing children!”
Ann Poynings extricated her wrist from his unconscious clutch. Was all this a mere bookworm’s eccentricity, or was the man actually out of his wits?
“Well?” she pursued. “And your idea is to analyze the motives that make people go on living when they are sick of life? Is that it, Mr. Hastings?”
He suddenly threw out both his arms toward her, so that she started back with considerable alarm; but he laid his hands on her shoulders and spoke thick and fast.
“I’ve always known you weren’t quite like the rest. I’ve always known I could tell you about it,” he began. “The Ashovers are enslaved by their sensations. They live for their sensations. But you’re different. You live for something else. They are all nothing to me, I tell you. No one is anything to me except as a proof of my discovery! It’s like this. What I’ve found out is the original secret of Life-Destruction; the great anti-vital energy, the death energy! What I’ve found out is the thing that one of the old poets symbolized once as the Breath of Demogorgon. It is just as much an organic force, an actual magnetic force, as radium or electricity. But it is more powerful than these because it belongs to the soul.”
He paused breathlessly and dropped his hands from her shoulders.
“I know,” he began again, after another anxious glance round, to make sure they were alone, “that what I’ve discovered is not a mere metaphysical theory. Do you know how I know it?”
His voice became lower and more furtive and he leaned close to her in the darkness.
“I know it by actual evidence here in Ashover! No — don’t run away. They can wait. You must hear me out now I’ve begun to speak. Ever since I came to this place I have been conscious of the power the dead have to preserve something of themselves alive in the world! Old families, like these Ashovers, have this power; just as old planets, like Saturn and Uranus, have it. Now do you know what I am doing? I am thwarting these dead! I am driving them back. I say this to you so that you can bear witness to the truth. There’ll be no more Ashovers born into Frome-side. Rook and Lexie are the last!”
Lady Ann instinctively pressed her hands against her body as if to assure herself of its material substantiality. There was something so sinister and ghastly in the man’s tone, and something so formidable in the perverse power that emanated from him, that she felt for a moment actually weak and faint. What horrible instinct of a distorted brain made him say these things to her rather than to any one else?
She glanced across the hushed empty fields, lying dim and vague before them. She searched for that “miraculous crescent”, but while they had looked away, it had been swallowed up by the clouds. Alone with this sombre figure of negation, hovering there like a great gray owl in front of her, in starched shirt and woolly overcoat, her mind clouded and darkened, she felt as if she were struggling with some hideous sort of nightmare. The whole scene — the blank wall, the dark forms of the willows, the hoar frost on the grass — all seemed unreal, fantastic, like something that must be broken to pieces by an effort of the will!
That she — Ann Poynings — should be spending New Year’s Eve with a human being dominated by such woe-begotten fancies, rumoured out of the remote heathen Past with “Gorgons, Hydras, and Chimæras dire,” seemed to suggest some mad hallucination. It must be, she thought, the troubled expectation in her nerves as to what might come of the affair with Rook that exposed her so to this lunatic’s chatter. She would throw the crazy enchantment off, break it up, return to her normal vision!
With a gallant effort of all the forces of her strong and cynical youth she did turn upon him now with a forced lightness of tone that would have changed the whole temper of the conversation with any one but William Hastings.
“But what about the book, Mr. Hastings? The question as to whether it is better for old families to die out or not to die out does not seem to require a whole volume.”
The change in her tone seemed quite lost upon him in his excitement, but he had built up such an edifice of secrecy about his thoughts that to express himself with any clearness had become impossible.
“My book?” he muttered. “My book? I can’t explain it to you now. It goes too far, too deep. Some day all the world will know. When I am dead, Lady Ann; when I am dead! But I have written it all down; step by step I have made it all plain. Every page has that breath upon it which the old poet talks of, the breath of Demogorgon! And when I am dead and they understand what I’ve discovered, what a power I shall have put into the souls of men! I shall have given man the power to counteract the creativeness of God. And Man shall say, ‘Let there be Darkness!’ and there shall be Darkness.”
His voice died away over the frozen meadows. “Let us go back. Let us go in,” he said after a pause. “I don’t suppose that any human creature has ever felt the disgusting loathsomeness of life more than I have. Too many horrible things! Too many horrible thoughts! Oh, what a day — what a day — when it is all absolutely wiped out!”
They turned back together up the lane and stopped at Lexie’s house. They could see the illuminated figures of their friends between the curtains of the room upstairs.