Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  “But you yourself,” protested the artist, “are you not one of these same people? I understand that you—”

  Mr. Quincunx rose to his feet, his expressive nostrils quivering with anger. “I don’t allow anyone to say that of me!” he cried, “I may have my faults, but I’m as different from all these rats as a guillemot is different from a cormorant!”

  He sat down again and his voice took almost a pleading tone. “You know I’m different. You must know I’m different! How could I see all these things as clearly as I do if it wasn’t so? I’ve undergone what that German calls ‘the Great Renunciation.’ I’ve escaped the will to live. I neither care to acquire myself this accursed power—or to revolt, in jealous envy, against those who possess it.”

  He relapsed into silence and contemplated his garden and its enclosing hedge, with a look of profound melancholy. Dangelis had been considerably distracted during the latter part of this discourse by his artistic interest in the delicate lines of Lacrima’s figure and the wistful sadness of her expression. It was borne in upon him that he had somewhat neglected this shy cousin of his exuberant young friend. He promised himself to see more of the Italian, as occasion served. Perhaps—if only Gladys would agree to it—he might make use of her, also, in his Dionysian impressions.

  “Surely,” he remarked, speaking with the surface of his intelligence, and pondering all the while upon the secret of Lacrima’s charm, “whatever this man may be, he’s not a hypocrite,—is he? From all I hear he’s pathetically in earnest.”

  “Of course we know he’s in earnest,” answered Maurice. “What I maintain is, that it is his personal vindictiveness that creates his opinions. I believe he would derive genuine pleasure from seeing Nevilton House burnt to the ground, and every one of the people in it reduced to ashes!”

  “That proves his sincerity,” answered the American, keeping his gaze fixed so intently upon Lacrima that the girl began to be embarrassed.

  “He takes the view-point, no doubt, that if the present oligarchy in England were entirely destroyed, a new and happier epoch would begin at once.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Wone is opposed to every kind of violence,” threw in Lacrima.

  “Nonsense!” cried Mr. Quincunx abruptly. “He may not like violence because he’s afraid of it reacting on himself. But what he wants to do is to humiliate everyone above him, to disturb them, to prod them, to harass and distress them, and if possible to bring them down to his own level. He’s got his thumb on Lacrima’s friends over there,”—he waved his hand in the direction of Nevilton House,—“because they happen to be at the top of the tree at this moment. But if you or I were there, it would be just the same. It’s all jealousy. That’s what it is,—jealousy and envy! He wants to make every one who’s prosperous and eats meat, and drinks champagne, know what it is to live a dog’s life, as he has known it himself! I understand his feelings very well. We poor toads, who live in the mud, get extraordinary pleasure when any of you grand gentlemen slip by accident into our dirty pond. He sees such people enjoying themselves and being happy and he wants to stick a few pins into them!”

  “But why not, my good sir?” answered the American. “Why shouldn’t Wone use all his energy to crush Romer, just as Romer uses all his energy to crush Wone?”

  Lacrima sighed. “I don’t think either of you make this world seem a very nice place,” she observed.

  “A nice place?” cried Mr. Quincunx. “It’s a place poisoned at the root—a place full of gall and wormwood!”

  “In my humble opinion,” said the American, “it’s a splendid world. I love to see these little struggles and contests going on. I love to see the delicious inconsistences and self-deceptions that we’re all guilty of. I play the game myself, and I love to see others play it. Its the only thing I do love, except—” he added after a pause—“except my pictures.”

  “I loathe the game,” retorted the recluse, “and I find it impossible to live with people who do not loathe it too.”

  “Well—all I can say, my friend,” observed Dangelis, “is that this business of ‘renouncing,’ of which you talk, doesn’t appeal to me. It strikes me as a backing down and scurrying away, from the splendid adventure of being alive at all. What are you alive for,” he added, “if you are going to condemn the natural combatative instinct of men and women as evil and horrible? They are the instincts by which we live. They are the motives that propel the whole universe.”

  “Mr. Wone would say,” interposed Lacrima, “and I’m not sure that I don’t agree with him, that the real secret of the universe is deeper than all these unhappy struggles. I don’t like the unctuous way he puts these things, but he may be right all the same.”

  “There’s no secret of the universe, Miss Traffio,” the American threw in. “There are many things we don’t understand. But no one principle,—not even the principle of love itself, can be allowed to monopolize the whole field. Life, I always feel, is better interpreted by Art than by anything else, and Art is equally interested in every kind of energy.”

  Lacrima’s face clouded, and her hands fell wearily upon her lap.

  “Some sorts of energy,” she observed, in a low voice, “are brutal and dreadful. If Art expresses that kind, I’m afraid I don’t care for Art.”

  The American gave her a quick, puzzled glance. There was a sorrowful intensity about her tone which he found difficult to understand.

  “What I meant was,” he said, “that logically we can only do one of two things,—either join in the game and fight fiercely and craftily for our own hand, or take a convenient drop of poison and end the whole affair.”

  The melancholy eyes of Mr. Quincunx opened very wide at this, and a fluttering smile twitched the corners of his mouth.

  “We poor dogs,” he said, “who are not wanted in this world, and don’t believe in any other, are just the people who are most unwilling to finish ourselves off in the way you suggest. We can’t help a sort of sneaking hope, that somehow or another, through no effort of our own, things will become better for us. The same cowardice that makes us draw back from life, makes us draw back from the thought of death. Can’t you understand that,—you American citizen?”

  Dangelis looked from one to another of his companions. He could not help thinking in his heart of the gay animated crowds, who, at that very moment, in the streets of Toledo, Ohio, were pouring along the side-walks and flooding the picture shows. These quaint Europeans, for all their historic surroundings, were certainly lacking in the joy of life.

  “I can’t conceive,” remarked Mr. Quincunx suddenly, and with that amazing candour which distinguished him, “how a person as artistic and sensitive as you are, can stay with those people over there. Anyone can see that you’re as different from them as light from darkness.”

  “My dear sir,” replied the American, interrupting a feeble little protest which Lacrima was beginning to make at the indiscretion of her friend, “I may or may not understand your wonder. The point is, that my whole principle of life is to deal boldly and freely with every kind of person. Can’t you see that I like to look on at the spectacle of Mr. Romer’s energy and prosperity, just as I like to look on at the revolt against these things in the mind of our friend Wone. I tell you it tickles my fancy to touch this human pantomime on every possible side. The more unjust Romer is towards Wone, the more I am amused. And the more unjust Wone is towards Romer, the more I am amused. It is out of the clash of these opposite injustices that nature,—how shall I put it?—that nature expands and grows.”

  Mr. Quincunx gazed at the utterer of these antinomian sentiments, with humorous interest. Dangelis gathered, from the twitching of his heavy moustache, that he was chuckling like a goblin. The queer fellow had a way of emerging out of his melancholy, at certain moments, like a badger out of his hole; and at such times he would bring the most ideal or speculative conversation down with a jerk to the very bed-rock of reality.

  “What’s amusing you so?” enquired the citizen o
f Ohio.

  “I was only thinking,” chuckled Mr. Quincunx, stroking his beard, and glancing sardonically at Lacrima, “that the real reason of your enjoying yourself at Nevilton House, is quite a different one from any you have mentioned.”

  Dangelis was for the moment quite confused. “Confound the fellow!” he muttered to himself, “I’m curst if I’m sorry he’s under the thumb of our friend Romer!”

  His equanimity was soon restored, however, and he covered his confusion by assuming a light and flippant air.

  “Ha! ha!” he exclaimed, “so you’re thinking I’ve been caught by this young lady’s cousin? Well! I don’t mind confessing that we get on beautifully together. But as for anything else, I think Miss Traffio will bear witness that I am quite as devoted to the mother as the daughter. But Gladys Romer must be admitted a very attractive girl,—mustn’t she Miss Traffio? I suppose our friend here is not so stern an ascetic as to refuse an artist like me the pleasure of admiring such adorable suppleness as your cousin possesses; such a—such a—” he waved his hand vaguely in the air,” such a free and flexible sort of grace?”

  Mr. Quincunx picked up a rough ash stick which lay on the ground and prodded the earth. His face showed signs of growing once more convulsed with indecent merriment.

  “Why do you use all those long words?” he said. “We country dogs go more straight to the point in these matters. Flexible grace! Can’t you confess that you’re bitten by the old Satan, which we all have in us? Adorable suppleness! Why can’t you say a buxom wench, a roguish wench, a playful wanton wench? We country fellows don’t understand your subtle artistic expressions. But we know what it is when an honest foreigner like yourself goes walking and talking with a person like Madame Gladys!”

  Glancing apprehensively at the American’s face Lacrima saw that her friend’s rudeness had made him, this time, seriously angry.

  She rose from her chair. “We must be getting back,” she said, “or we shall be late. I hope you and Mr. Dangelis will know more of one another, before he has to leave Nevilton. I’m sure you’ll find that you’ve quite a lot in common, when you really begin to understand each other.”

  The gravity and earnestness with which she uttered these words made both her companions feel a little ashamed.

  “After all,” thought the artist, “he is a typical Englishman.”

  “After all,” thought Mr. Quincunx, “I’ve always been told that Americans treat women as if they were made of tissue-paper.”

  Their parting from the recluse at his garden gate was friendly and natural. Mr. Quincunx reverted to his politest manner, and the artist’s good temper seemed quite restored.

  In retrospect, after the passing of a couple of days, spent by Dangelis in preparing the accessories of his Ariadne picture, and by Gladys in unpacking certain mysterious parcels telegraphed for to London, the American found himself recalling his visit to Dead Man’s Cottage with none but amiable feelings. The third morning which followed this visit, dawned upon Nevilton with peculiar propitiousness. The air was windless and full of delicious fragrance. The bright clear sunshine seemed to penetrate every portion of the spacious Elizabethan mansion and to turn its corridors and halls, filled with freshly plucked flowers, into a sort of colossal garden house.

  Dangelis rose that morning with a more than normal desire to plunge into his work. He was considerably annoyed, however, to find that Gladys had actually arranged to have Mr. Clavering invited to lunch and had gone so far as to add a pencilled scrawl of her own—she herself laughingly confessed as much—to her mother’s formal note, begging him to appear in the middle of the forenoon, as she had a “surprise” in store for him.

  The American’s anxiety to begin work as soon as possible with his attractive model, made him suffer miseries of impatience, while Gladys amused herself with her Ariadne draperies, making Lacrima dress and undress her twenty times, behind the screens of the studio.

  She appeared at last, however, and the artist, looking up at her from his canvas, was for the moment staggered by her beauty. The instinctive taste of her cousin’s Latin fingers was shown in the exquisite skill with which the classical folds of the dress she wore accentuated the natural charm of her young form.

  The stuff of which her chief garment was made was of a deep gentian blue and the contrast between this color and the dazzling whiteness of her neck and arms was enough to ravish not only the æsthetic soul in the man but his more human senses also. Her bare feet were encased in white sandals, bound by slender leathern straps, which were twisted round her legs almost as high as the knee. A thin metal band, of burnished bronze, was clasped about her head, and over and under this, her magnificent sun-coloured hair flowed, in easy and natural waves, to where it was caught up, in a Grecian knot, above the nape of her neck. Save for this band round her head she wore no clasps or jewelry of any kind, and the softness of her flesh was made more emphatic by the somewhat rough and coarse texture of her loosely folded drapery. Dangelis was so lost in admiration of this delicious apparition, that he hardly noticed Lacrima’s timid farewell, as the Italian slipped away into the garden and left them together. It was indeed not till Gladys had descended from the little wooden platform and coyly approached the side of his easel, that the artist recovered himself.

  “Upon my soul, but you look perfectly wonderful!” he cried enthusiastically. “Quick! Let’s to business. I want to get well started, before we have any interruption.”

  He led her back to the platform, and made her lean in a semi-recumbent position upon a cushioned bench which he had prepared for the purpose. He took a long time to satisfy himself as to her precise pose, but at last, with a lucky flash of inspiration, and not without assistance from Gladys herself, whose want of aesthetic feeling was compensated for in this case by the profoundest of all feminine instincts, he found for her the inevitable, the supremely effective, position. It was with a thrill of exquisite sweetness, pervading both soul and senses, that he began painting her. He felt as though this were one of the few flawless and unalloyed moments of his life. Everything in him and about him seemed to vibrate and quiver in response to the breath of beauty and youth. Penetrated by the delicate glow of a passion which was free, at present, from the sting of sensual craving, he felt as though all the accumulative impressions, of a long procession of harmonious days, were summed up and focussed in this fortunate hour. The loveliness of the young girl, as he transferred it, curve by curve, shadow by shadow, to his canvas, seemed expressive of a reserved secret of enchantment, until this moment withheld and concealed from him. The ravishing contours of her lithe figure seemed to open up, to his magnetized imagination, vistas and corridors of emotion, such as he had never even dreamed of experiencing. She was more than a supremely lovely girl. She was the very epitome and incarnation of all those sunward striving forces and impulses, which, rising from the creative heart of the universe, struggle upwards through the resisting darkness. She was a Sun-child, a creature of air and earth and fire, a daughter of Circe and Dionysus; and as he drained the so frankly offered philtre of her intoxicating beauty, and flung his whole soul’s response to it in glowing color upon the canvas, he felt that he would never again thus catch the fates asleep, or thus plunge his hands into the nectar of the supreme gods.

  The world presented itself to him at that moment, while he swept his brush with fierce passionate energy across the canvas, as bathed in translucent and unclouded ether. Everything it contained, of weakness and decadence, of gloom and misgiving, seemed to be transfigured, illuminated, swallowed up. He felt as though, in thus touching the very secret of divine joy, held in the lap of the abysmal mothers, nothing but energy and beauty and creative force would ever concern or occupy him again. All else,—all scruples, all questions, all problems, all renunciations—seemed but irrelevant and negligible vapour, compared with this glorious and sun-lit stream of life. He worked on feverishly at his task. By degrees, and in so incredibly a short time that Gladys herself was astonished
when he told her she could rest and stretch herself a little, the figure of the Ariadne he had seen in his imagination limned itself against the expectant background. He was preparing to resume his labour, and Gladys, after a boyish scramble into the neighbouring conservatory, and an eager return to the artist’s side with a handful of early strawberries, was just re-mounting the platform, when the door of the studio opened and Hugh Clavering entered.

  He had been almost inclined,—in so morbid a condition were his nerves—to knock at the door before coming in, but a lucky after-thought had reminded him that such an action would have been scandalously inappropriate.

  Assuming an air of boyish familiarity, which harmonized better perhaps with her leather-bound ankles than with her girlish figure, Gladys jumped down at once from the little stage and ran gaily to welcome him. She held out her hand, and then, raising both her arms to her head and smoothing back her bright hair beneath its circlet of bronze, she inquired of him, in a soft low murmur, whether he thought she looked “nice.”

  Clavering was struck dumb. He had all those shivering sensations of trembling agitation which are described with such realistic emphasis in the fragmentary poem of Sappho. The playful girl, her fair cheeks flushed with excitement and a treacherous light in her blue eyes, swung herself upon the rough oak table that stood in the middle of the room, and sat there, smiling coyly at him, dangling her sandalled feet. She still held in her hand the strawberries she had picked; and as, with childish gusto, she put one after another of these between her lips, she looked at him with an indescribable air of mischievous, challenging defiance.