Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  “Certainly the same. Our stone, Mr. Romer’s stone, the stone upon which we all live here—except those who till the fields.”

  “I hate the thing!” cried Lacrima, in curious agitation.

  “You do? Well—to tell you the honest truth, so do I. I associate it with my father.”

  “I associate it with Gladys,” whispered Lacrima.

  “I can believe it. We both associate it with houses of tyranny, of wretched persecution. Perhaps I have never told you that my father was directly the cause of my mother’s death?”

  “You have hinted it,” murmured the girl. “I suspected it. But Luke loves the stone, doesn’t he? He always speaks as if the mere handling of it, in his workshop, gave him exquisite pleasure.”

  “A great many things give Luke exquisite pleasure,” returned the other grimly. “Luke lives for exquisite pleasure.”

  A quick step on the grass behind them made them swing suddenly round. It was Vennie Seldom, who, unobserved, had been watching them from the vicarage terrace. A few paces behind her came Mr. Taxater, walking cautiously and deliberately, with the air of a Lord Chesterfield returning from an audience at St. James’. Mr. Taxater had already met the Italian on one or two occasions. He had sat next to her once, when dining at Nevilton House, and he was considerably interested in her.

  “What a lovely evening, Miss Traffio,” said Vennie shyly, but without embarrassment. Vennie was always shy, but nothing ever interfered with her self-possession.

  “I am glad you are showing Mr. Andersen these orchards of ours. I always think they are the most secluded place in the whole village.”

  “Ha!” said Mr. Taxater, when he had greeted them with elaborate and friendly courtesy, “I thought you two were bound to make friends sooner or later! I call you my two companions in exile, among our dear Anglo-Saxons. Miss Traffio I know is Latin, and you, sir, must have some kind of foreign blood. I am right, am I not, Mr. Andersen?”

  James looked at him humorously, though a little grimly. He was always pleased to be addressed by Mr. Taxater, as indeed was everybody who knew him. The great scholar’s detached intellectualism gave him an air of complete aloofness from all social distinctions.

  “Perhaps I may have,” he answered. “My mother used to hint at something of the kind. She was always very fond of foreign books. I rather fancy that I once heard her say something about a strain of Spanish blood.”

  “I thought so! I thought so!” cried Mr. Taxater, pulling his hat over his eyes and protruding his chin and under-lip, in the manner peculiar to him when especially pleased.

  “I thought there was something Spanish in you. How extraordinarily interesting! Spain,—there is no country like it in the world! You must go to Spain, Mr. Andersen. You would go there in a different spirit from these wretched sight-seers who carry their own vulgarity with them. You would go with that feeling of reverence for the great things of civilization, which is inseparable from the least drop of Latin blood.”

  “Would you like to see Spain, Miss Traffio? enquired Vennie. “Mr. Taxater, I notice, always leaves out us women, when he makes his attractive proposals. I think he thinks that we have no capacity for understanding this civilization he talks of.”

  “I think you understand everything, better than any man could,” murmured Lacrima, conscious of an extraordinary depth of sympathy emanating from this frail figure.

  “Miss Seldom has been trying to make me appreciate the beauty of these orchards,” went on Mr. Taxater, addressing James. “But I am afraid I am not very easily converted. I have a prejudice against orchards. For some reason or other, I associate them with dragons and serpents.”

  “Miss Seldom has every reason to love the beautiful aspects of our Nevilton scenery,” said the stone-carver. “Her ancestors possessed all these fields and orchards so long, that it would be strange if their descendant did not have an instinctive passion for them.” He uttered these words with that curious undertone of bitterness which marked all his references to aristocratic pretension.

  Little Vennie brushed the sarcasm gently aside, as if it had been a fluttering moth.

  “Yes, I do love them in a sense,” she said, “but you must remember that I, too, was educated in a Latin country. So, you see, we four are all outsiders and heretics! I fancy your brother, Mr. Andersen, is an ingrained Neviltonian.”

  James smiled in a kindly, almost paternal manner, at the little descendant of the Tudor courtiers. Her sweetness and artless goodness made him feel ashamed of his furtive truculence.

  “I wish you would come in and see my mother and me, one of these evenings,” said Vennie, looking rather wistfully at Lacrima and putting a more tender solicitation into her tone than the mere words implied.

  Lacrima hesitated. “I am afraid I cannot promise,” she said nervously. “My cousin generally wants me in the evening.”

  “Perhaps,” put in Mr. Taxater, with his most Talleyrand-like air, “a similar occasion to the present one may arise again, when with Mr. Andersen’s permission, we may all adjourn to the vicarage garden.”

  Lacrima, rather uncomfortably, looked down at the grass.

  “We four, being, as we have admitted, all outsiders here,” went on the diplomatist, “ought to have no secrets from one another. I think”—he looked at Vennie—“we may just as well confess to our friends that we quite realize the little—charming—‘friendship,’ shall I say?—that has sprung up between this gentleman’s brother and Miss Romer.”

  “I think,” said James Andersen hurriedly, in order to relieve Lacrima’s embarrassment, “I think the real bond between Luke and Miss Gladys is their mutual pleasure in all this luxuriant scenery. Somehow I feel as if you, sir, and Miss Seldom, were quite separate from it and outside it.”

  “Yes,” cried Vennie eagerly, “and Lacrima is outside it, because she is half-Italian, and you are outside it because you are half-Spanish.”

  “It is clear, then,” said Mr. Taxater, “that we four must form a sort of secret alliance, an alliance based upon the fact that even Miss Seldom’s lovely orchards do not altogether make us forget what civilization means!”

  Neither of the two girls seemed quite to understand what the theologian implied, but Andersen shot at him a gleam of appreciative gratitude.

  “I was telling Miss Traffio,” he said, “that under this grass, not very many feet down, a remarkable layer of sandstone obtrudes itself.”

  “An orchard based on rock,” murmured Mr. Taxater, “that, I think, is an admirable symbol of what this place represents. Clay at the top and sandstone at the bottom! I wonder whether it is better, in this world, to be clay or stone? We four poor foreigners have, I suspect, a preference for a material very different from both of these. Our element would be marble. Eh, Andersen? Marble that can resist all these corrupting natural forces and throw them back, and hold them down. I always think that marble is the appropriate medium of civilization’s retort to instinct and savagery. The Latin races have always built in marble. It was certainly of marble that our Lord was thinking when he used his celebrated metaphor about the founding of the Church.”

  The stone-carver made no answer. He had noticed a quick supplicating glance from Lacrima’s dark eyes.

  “Well,”—he said, “I think I must be looking for my brother, and I expect our young lady is waiting for Miss Traffio.”

  They bade their friends good-night and moved off.

  “I am always at your service,” were Mr. Taxater’s last words, “if ever either of you care to appeal to the free-masonry of the children of marble against the children of clay.”

  As they retraced their steps Andersen remarked to his companion how curious it was, that neither Vennie nor Mr. Taxater seemed in the least aware of anything extraordinary or unconventional in this surreptitious friendship between the girls from the House and their father’s workmen.

  “Yes, I wonder what Mrs. Seldom would think of us,” rejoined Lacrima, “but she probably thinks Gladys is capable o
f anything and that I am as bad as she is. But I do like that little Vennie! I believe she is a real saint. She gives me such a queer feeling of being different from everyone.

  “Mr. Taxater no doubt is making a convert of her,” said the stone-carver. “And I have a suspicion that he hopes to convert Gladys too, probably through your influence.”

  “I don’t like to think that of him,” replied the girl. “He seems to me to admire Vennie for herself and to be kind to us for ourselves. I think he is a thoroughly good man.”

  “Possibly—possibly,” muttered James, “but I don’t trust him. I never have trusted him.”

  They said no more, and threaded their way slowly through the orchard to the place where they had left the others. The wind had dropped and there was a dull, obstinate expectancy in the atmosphere. Every leaf and grass blade seemed to be intently alert and listening.

  In her heart Lacrima was conscious of an unusual sense of foreboding and apprehension. Surely there could be nothing worse in store for her than what she already suffered. She wondered what Maurice Quincunx was doing at that moment. Was he thinking of her, and were his thoughts the cause of this strange oppression in the air? Poor Maurice! She longed to be free to devote herself to him, to smooth his path, to distract his mind. Would fate ever make such a thing possible? How unfair Gladys was in her suspicions!

  She liked James Andersen and was very grateful to him, but he did not need her as Maurice needed her!

  “I see them!” she cried suddenly. “But how odd they look! They’re not speaking a word. Have they quarrelled, I wonder?”

  The two fair-haired amorists appeared indeed extremely gloomy and melancholy, as they sat, with a little space between them, on the fallen tree. They rose with an air of relief at the others approach.

  “I thought you were never coming,” said Gladys. “How long you have been! We have been waiting for hours. Come along. We must go straight back and dress or we shall be late for dinner. No time for good-byes! Au revoir, you two! Come along, girl, quick! We’d better run.”

  She seized her cousin’s hand and dragged her off and they were quickly out of sight.

  The two brothers watched them disappear and then turned and walked away together. “Don’t let’s go home yet,” said Luke. “Let’s go to the churchyard first. The sun will have set, but it won’t be dark for a long time. And I love the churchyard in the twilight.”

  James nodded. “It is our garden, isn’t it,—and our orchard? It is the only spot in Nevilton where no one can interfere with us.”

  “That, and the Seldom Arms,” added the younger brother.

  They paced side by side in silence till they reached the road. The orchards, left to themselves, relapsed into their accustomed reserve. Whatever secrets they concealed of the confused struggles of ephemeral mortals, they concealed in inviolable discretion.

  CHAPTER XI

  ART AND NATURE

  THE early days of June, all of them of the same quality of golden weather, were hardly over, before our wanderer from Ohio found himself on terms of quite pleasant familiarity with the celibate vicar of Nevilton, whose relations with his friend Gladys so immensely interested him.

  The conscientious vicar had sought him out, on the very day after his visit to the mill copse, and the artist had found the priest more to his fancy than he had imagined possible.

  The American’s painting had begun in serious earnest. A studio had been constructed for him in one of the sheds near the conservatory, a place much more full of light and air and pleasant garden smells, than would have been the lumber-room referred to by Mrs. Romer, adjoining the chaste slumbers of the laborious Lily. Here for several long mornings he had worked at high pressure and in a vein of imaginative expansion.

  Something of the seething sap of these incomparable days seemed to pass into his blood. He plunged into a bold and original series of Dionysic “impressions,” seeking to represent, in accordance with his new vision, those legendary episodes in the life of the divine Wanderer which seemed most capable of lending themselves to a half-realistic, half-fantastic transmutation, of the people and places immediately around him. He sought to introduce into these pictures the very impetus and pressure of the exuberant earth-force, as he felt it stirring and fermenting in his own veins, and in those of the persons and animals about him. He strove to clothe the shadowy poetic outline of the classical story with fragments and morsels of actual experience, as one by one his imaginative intellect absorbed them.

  Here, too, under the sycamores and elms of Nevilton, the old world-madness followed the alternations of sun and moon, with the same tragic swiftness and the same ambiguous beauty, as when, with tossing arms and bared throats, the virgins of Thessaly flung themselves into the dew-starred thickets.

  Dangelis began by making cautious and tentative use of such village children as he found it possible to lay hands upon, as models in his work, but this method did not prove very satisfactory.

  The children, when their alarm and inqusitiveness wore off, grew tired and turbulent; and on more than one occasion the artist had to submit to astonishing visits from confused and angry parents who called him a “foreigner” and a “Yankee,” and qualified these appelations with epithets so astoundingly gross, that Dangelis was driven to wonder from what simple city-bred fancy the illusion of rural innocence had first proceeded.

  At length, as the days went on, the bold idea came into his head of persuading Gladys herself to act as his model.

  His relations with her had firmly established themselves now on the secure ground of playful camaraderie, and he knew enough of her to feel tolerably certain that he had only to broach such a scheme, to have it welcomed with enthusiastic ardour.

  He made the suggestion one evening as they walked home together after her spiritual lesson. “I find that last picture of mine extremely difficult to manage,” he said.

  “Why! I think its the best of them all!” cried Gladys. “You’ve got a lovely look of longing in the eyes of your queer god; and the sail of Theseus’ ship, as you see it against the blue sea, is wonderful. The little bushes and things, too, you’ve put in; I like them particularly. They remind me of that wood down by the mill, where I caught the thrush. I suppose you’ve forgotten all about that day,” she added, giving him a quick sidelong glance.

  The artist seized his opportunity. “They would remind you still more of our wood,” he said eagerly, “if you let me put you in as Ariadne! Do, Gladys,”—he had called her Gladys for some days—“you will make a simply adorable Ariadne. As she is now, she is wooden, grotesque, archaic—nothing but drapery and white ankles!”

  The girl had flushed with pleasure as soon as she caught the drift of his request. Now she glanced mischievously and mockingly at him.

  “My ankles,” she murmured laughing, “are not so very, very beautiful!”

  “Please be serious, Gladys,” he said, “I am really quite in earnest. It will just make the difference between a masterpiece and a fiasco.”

  “You are very conceited,” she retorted teasingly, “but I suppose I oughtn’t to say that, ought I, as my precious ankles are to be a part of this masterpiece?”

  She ran in front of him down the drive, and, as if to give him an exhibition of her goddess-like agility, caught at an over-hanging bough and swung herself backwards and forwards.

  “What fun!” she cried, as he approached. “Of course I’ll do it, Mr. Dangelis.” Then, with a sudden change of tone and a very malign expression, as she let the branch swing back and resumed her place at his side, “Mr. Clavering must see me posing for you. He must say whether he thinks I’m good enough for Ariadne.”

  The artist looked a shade disconcerted by this unexpected turn to the project, but he was too anxious to make sure of his model to raise any premature objections. “But you must please understand,” was all he said, “that I am very much in earnest about this picture. If anybody but myself does see you, there must be no teasing and fooling.”

/>   “Oh, I long for him to see me!” cried the girl. “I can just imagine his face, I can just imagine it!”

  The artist frowned. “This is not a joke, Gladys. Mind you, if I do let Clavering into our secret, it’ll be only on condition that you promise not to flirt with him. I shall want you to stay very still,—just as I put you.”

  Dangelis had never indicated before quite so plainly his blunt and unvarnished view of her relations with her spiritual adviser, and he now looked rather nervously at her to see how she received this intimation.

  “I love teasing Mr. Clavering!” she cried savagely, “I should like to tease him so much, that he never, never, would forget it!”

  This extreme expression of feeling was a surprise, and by no means a pleasant one, to Ralph Dangelis.

  “Why do you want so much to upset our friend?” he enquired.

  “I suppose,” she answered, still instinctively playing up to his idea of her naiveté and childishness, “it is because he thinks himself so good and so perfectly safe from falling in love with anyone—and that annoys me.”

  “Ha!” chuckled Dangelis, “so that’s it, is it?” and he paced in thoughtful silence by her side until they reached the house.

  The morning that followed this conversation was as warm as the preceding ones, but a strong southern wind had risen, with a remote touch of the sea in its gusty violence. The trees in the park, as the artist and his girl-friend watched them from the terrace, while Mr. Romer, who had now returned from town worked in his study, and Lacrima helped Mrs. Romer to “do the flowers,” swayed and rustled ominously in the eddying gusts.

  Clouds of dust kept blowing across the gates from the surface of the drive and the delphiniums bent low on their long stalks. The wind was of that peculiar character which, though hot and full of balmy scents, conveys a feeling of uneasiness and troubled expectation. It suggested thunder and with and beyond that, something threatening, calamitous and fatal.

  Gladys was pre-occupied and gloomy that morning. She was growing a little, just a little, tired of the American’s conversation. Even the excitement of arranging about the purchase in Yeoborough of suitable materials for her Ariadne costume did not serve to lift the shadow from her brow.