Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  Lacrima waited in patient passivity, too exhausted to make any further mental or moral effort, while her friend made the tea and cut the bread-and-butter.

  As soon as she had partaken of these things, her exhaustion gave place to a delicious sense—the first she had known for many weeks—of peaceful and happy security. She put far away, into the remote background of her mind, all melancholy and tragic thoughts, and gave herself up to the peacefulness of the moment. The hands of Mr. Quincunx’s clock pointed to half-past six. She had therefore a clear thirty minutes left, before she need set out on her return walk, in order to have time to dress for dinner.

  “I wonder if your Miss Gladys,” remarked Lacrima’s host, lighting a cigarette as he sipped his tea, “will marry the Honourable Mr. Ilminster after all, or whistle him down the wind, and make up to our American friend? I notice that Dangelis is already considerably absorbed in her.”

  “Please, dear, don’t let us talk any more about these people,” begged Lacrima softly. “Let me be happy for a little while.”

  Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard. “You are a queer little girl,” he said. “But what I should do if the gods took you away from me I have not the least idea. I should not care then whether I worked in an office or in a factory. I should not care what I did.”

  The girl jumped up impulsively from her seat and went over to him. Mr. Quincunx took her upon his knees as he might have taken a child and fondled her gravely and gently. The smoke of his cigarette ascended in a thin blue column above their two heads.

  At that moment there was a mocking laugh at the window. Lacrima slid out of his arms and they both rose to their feet and turned indignantly.

  The laughing face of Gladys Romer peered in upon them, her eyes shining with delighted malevolence. “I saw you,” she cried. “But you needn’t look so cross! I like to see these things. I have been watching you for quite a long time! It has been such fun! I only hoped I could keep quiet for longer still, till one of you began to cry, or something. But you looked so funny that I couldn’t help laughing. And that spoilt it all. Mr. Dangelis is at the gate. Shall I call him up? He came with me across the park. He tried to stop me from pouncing on you, but I wouldn’t listen to him. He said it was a ‘low-down stunt.’ You know the way he talks, Lacrima!”

  The two friends stood staring at the intruder in petrified horror. Then without a word they quickly issued from the cottage and crossed the garden, Neither of them spoke to Gladys; and Mr. Quincunx immdiately returned to his house as soon as he saw the American advance to greet Lacrima with his usual friendly nonchalance.

  The three went off down the lane together; and the poor philosopher, staring disconsolately at the empty tea-cups of his profaned sanctuary, cursed himself, his friend, his fate, and the Powers that had appointed that fate from the beginning of the world.

  CHAPTER XIV

  UNDER-CURRENTS

  JUNE was drawing to an end, and the days, though still free from rain, grew less and less bright. A thin veil of greyish vapour, which never became thick enough or sank low enough to resolve itself into definite clouds, offered a perpetual hindrance to the shining of the sun. The sun was present. Its influence was felt in the warmth of the air; but when it became visible, it was only in the form of a large misty disc, at which the weakest eyes might gaze without distress or discomfort.

  On a certain evening when this vaporous obscurity made it impossible to ascertain the exact moment of the sun’s descent and when it might be said that afternoon became twilight before men or cattle realized that the day was over, Mr. Wone was assisting his son Philip in planting geraniums in his back garden.

  The Wone house was neither a cottage nor a villa. It was one of those nondescript and modest residences, which, erected in the mid-epoch of Victoria’s reign, when money was circulating freely among the middle-classes, win a kind of gentle secondary mellowness in the twentieth century by reason of something solid and liberal in their original construction. It stood at the corner of the upper end of Nevilton, where, beyond the fountain-square, the road from Yeoborough takes a certain angular turn to the north. The garden at the back of it, as with many of the cottages of the place, was larger than might have been expected, and over the low hedge which separated it from the meadows behind, the long ridge of wooded upland, with its emphatic lines of tall Scotch firs that made the southern boundary of the valley, was pleasantly and reassuringly visible.

  Philip Wone worked in Yeoborough. He was a kind of junior partner in a small local firm of tombstone makers—the very firm, in fact, which under the direction of the famous Gideon, had constructed the most remarkable monument in Nevilton churchyard. It was doubtful whether he would ever attain the position of full partner in this concern, for his manner of life was eccentric, and neither his ways nor his appearance were those of a youth who succeeds in business. He was a tall pallid creature. His dark coarse hair fell in a heavy wave over his white forehead, and his hands were thin and delicate as the hands of an invalid.

  He was an omnivorous reader and made incessant use of every subscription library that Yeoborough offered. His reading was of two kinds. He read romantic novels of every sort—good, bad, and indifferent—and he read the history of revolutions. There can hardly have been, in any portion of the earth’s surface, a revolution with whose characters and incidents Philip was unacquainted. His chief passion was for the great French Revolution, the personalities of which were more real to him than the majority of his own friends.

  Philip was by temperament and conviction an ardent anarchist; not an anarchist of Mr. Quincunx’s mild and speculative type, but of a much more formidable brand. He had also long ago consigned the idea of any Providential interference with the sequence of events upon earth, into the limbo of outworn superstitions.

  It was Philip’s notion, this, of planting geraniums in the back-garden. Dressed nearly always in black, and wearing a crimson tie, it was his one luxurious sensuality to place in his button-hole, as long as they were possibly available, some specimen or other of the geranium tribe, with a preference for the most flaming varieties.

  The Christian Candidate regarded his son with a mixture of contempt and apprehension. He despised his lack of business ability, and he viewed his intellectual opinions as the wilful caprices of a sulky and disagreeable temper.

  It was as a sort of pitying concession to the whim of a lunatic that Mr. Wone was now assisting Philip in planting these absurd geraniums. His own idea was that flower-gardens ought to be abolished altogether. He associated them with gentility and toryism and private property in land. Under the regime he would have liked to have established, all decent householders would have had liberal small holdings, where they would grow nothing but vegetables. Mr. Wone liked vegetables and ate of them very freely in their season. Flowers he regarded as the invention of the upper classes, so that their privately owned world might be decorated with exclusive festoons.

  “I shall go round presently,” he said to his son, “and visit all these people. I see no reason why Taxater and Clavering, as well as the two Andersens, should not make themselves of considerable use to me. I am tired of talking to these Leo’s Hill labourers. One day they will strike, and the next they won’t. All they think of is their own quarrel with Lickwit. They have no thought of the general interest of the country.”

  “No thought of your interests, you mean,” put in the son.

  “With these others it is different,” went on Mr. Wone, oblivious of the interruption. “It would be a real help to me if the more educated people of the place came out definitely on my side. They ought to do it. They know what this Romer is. They are thinking men. They must see that what the country wants is a real representative of the people.”

  “What the country wants is a little more honesty and a little less hypocrisy,” remarked the son.

  “It is abominable, this suppression of our Social Meeting. You have heard about that, I suppose?” pursued the candidate.

  “Put
ting an end to your appeals to Providence, eh?” said Philip, pressing the earth down round the roots of a brilliant flower.

  “I forbid you to talk like that,” cried his father. “I might at least expect that you would do something for me. You have done nothing, since my campaign opened, but make these silly remarks.”

  “Why don’t you pray about it?” jeered the irrepressible young man. “Mr Romer has not suppressed prayer, has he, as well as Political Prayer-Meetings?”

  “They were not political!” protested the aggrieved parent. “They were profoundly religious. What you young people do not seem to realize now-a-days is that the soul of this country is still God-fearing and religious-minded. I should myself have no hope at all for the success of this election, if I were not sure that God was intending to make His hand felt.”

  “Why don’t you canvass God, then?” muttered the profane boy.

  “I cannot allow you to talk to me in this way, Philip!” cried Mr. Wone, flinging down his trowel. “You know perfectly well that you believe as firmly as I do, in your heart. It is only that you think it impressive and original to make these silly jokes.”

  “Thank you, father,” replied Philip. “You certainly remove my doubts with an invincible argument! But I assure you I am quite serious. Nobody with any brain believes in God in these days. God died about the same time as Mr. Gladstone.”

  The Christian Candidate lost his temper. “I must beg you,” he said, “to keep your infidel nonsense to yourself. Your mother and I are sick of it! You had better stay in Yeoborough, and not come home at all, if you can’t behave like an ordinary person and keep a civil tongue.”

  Philip made no answer to this ultimatum, but smiled sardonically and went on planting geraniums.

  But his father was loath to let the matter drop.

  “What would the state of the country be like, I wonder,” he continued, “if people lost their faith in the love of a merciful Father? It is only because we feel, in spite of all appearances, the love of God must triumph in the end, that we can go on with our great movement. The love of God, young man, whatever you foolish infidels may say, is at the bottom of all attempts to raise the people to better things. Do you think I would labour as I do in this excellent cause if I did not feel that I had the loving power of a great Heavenly Father behind me? Why do I trouble myself with politics? Because His love constrains me. Why have I brought you up so carefully—though to little profit it seems!—and have been so considerate to your mother—who, as you know, isn’t always very cheerful? Because His love constrains me. Without the knowledge that His love is at the bottom of everything that happens, do you think I could endure to live at all?”

  Philip Wone lifted up his head from the flower-border.

  “Let me just tell you this, father, it is not the love of God, or of anyone else, that’s at the bottom of our grotesque world. There is nothing at the bottom! The world goes back—without limit or boundary—upwards and downwards, and everywhere. It has no bottom, and no top either! It is all quite mad and we are all quite mad. Love? Who knows anything of love, except lovers and madmen? If these Romers and Lickwits are to be crushed, they must be crushed by force. By force, I tell you! This love of an imaginary Heavenly Father has never done anything for the revolution and never will!”

  Mr. Wone, catching at a verbal triumph, regained his placable equanimity.

  “Because, dear boy,” he remarked, “it is not revolution that we want, but reconstruction. Force may destroy. It is only love that can rebuild.”

  No words can describe the self-satisfied unction with which the Christian Candidate pronounced this oracular saying.

  “Well, boy,” he added, “I must be off. I want to see Taxater and Clavering and both the Andersens tonight. I might see Quincunx too. Not that I think he can do very much.”

  “There’s only one way you’ll get James Andersen to help you,” remarked Philip, “and I doubt whether you’ll bring yourself to use that.”

  “I suppose you mean,” returned his father, “that Traffio girl, up at the House. I have heard that they have been seen together. But I thought she was going to marry John Goring.”

  “No, I don’t mean her,” said the son. “She’s all right. She’s a fine girl, and I am sorry for her, whether she marries Goring or not. The person I mean is little Ninsy Lintot, up at Wild Pine. She’s the only one in this place who can get a civil word out of Jim Andersen.”

  “Ninsy?” echoed his father, “but I thought Ninsy was dead and buried. There was some one died up at Wild Pine last spring, and I made sure ’twas her.”

  “That was her sister Glory,” affirmed Philip. “But Ninsy is delicate, too. A bad heart, they say—too bad for any thoughts of marrying. But she and Jim Andersen have been what you” might call sweethearts ever since she was in short frocks.”

  “I have never heard of this,” said Mr. Wone.

  “Nor have many other people here, returned Philip, “but ’tis true, none the less. And anyone who wants to get at friend James must go to him through Ninsy Lintot.”

  “I am extremely surprised at what you tell me,” said Mr. Wone. “Do you really mean that if I got this sick child to promise me Andersen’s help, he really would give it?”

  “Certainly I do,” replied Philip. “And what is more, he would bring his brother with him.”

  “But his brother is thick with Miss Romer. All the village is talking about them.”

  “Never mind the village—father! You think too much of the village and its talk. I tell you—Miss Romer or no Miss Romer—if you get James to help you, you get Luke. I know something of the ways of those two.”

  A look of foxy cunning crossed the countenance of the Christian Candidate.

  “Do you happen to have any influence with this poor Ninsy?” he asked abruptly, peering into his son’s face.

  Philip’s pale cheeks betrayed no embarrassment.

  “I know her,” he said. “I like her. I lend her books. She will die before Christmas.”

  “I wish you would go up and see her for me then,” said Mr. Wone eagerly. “It would be an excellent thing if we could secure the Andersens. They must have a lot of influence with the men they work with.”

  Philip glanced across the rich sloping meadows which led up to the base of the wooded ridge. From where they stood he could see the gloomy clump of firs and beeches which surrounded the little group of cottages known as Wild Pine.

  “Very well,” he said. “I don’t mind. But no more of this nonsense about my not coming home! I prefer for the present”—and he gave vent to rather an ominous laugh—“to live with my dear parents. But, mind—I can’t promise anything. These Andersens are queer fellows. One never knows how things will strike them. However, we shall see. If anyone could persuade our friend James, it would be Ninsy.”

  The affair being thus settled, the geraniums were abandoned; and while the father proceeded down the village towards the Gables, the son mounted the slope of the hill in the direction of Wild Pine.

  The path Philip followed soon became a narrow lane running between two high sandy banks, overtopped by enormous beeches. At all hours, and on every kind of day, this miniature gorge between the wooded fields was a dark and forlorn spot. On an evening of a day like the present one, it was nothing less than sinister. The sky being doubly dark above, dark with the coming on of night, and dark with the persistent cloud-veil, the accumulated shadows of this sombre road intensified the gloom to a pitch of darkness capable of exciting, in agitated nerves, an emotion bordering upon terror. Though the sun had barely sunk over Leo’s Hill, between these ivy-hung banks it was as obscure as if night had already fallen.

  But the obscurity of Root-Thatch Lane was nothing to the sombreness that awaited him when, arrived at the hill-top, he entered Nevil’s Gully. This was a hollow basin of close-growing beech-trees, surrounded on both sides by impenetrable thickets of bramble and elder, and crossed by the path that led to Wild Pine cottages. Every geographi
cal district has its typical and representative centre,—some characteristic spot which sums up, as it were, and focuses, in limited bounds, qualities and attributes that are diffused in diverse proportions through the larger area. Such a centre of the Nevilton district was the place through which Philip Wone now hurried.

  Nevil’s Gully, however dry the weather, was never free from an overpowering sense of dampness. The soil under foot was now no longer sand but clay, and clay of a particularly adhesive kind. The beech roots, according to their habit, had created an empty space about them—a sort of blackened floor, spotted with green moss and pallid fungi. Out of this, their cold, smooth trunks emerged, like silent pillars in the crypt of a mausoleum.

  The most characteristic thing, as we have noted, in the scenery of Nevilton, is its prevalent weight of heavy oppressive moisture. For some climatic or geographical reason the foliage of the place seems chillier, damper, and more filled with oozy sap, than in other localities of the West of England. Though there may have been no rain for weeks—as there had been none this particular June—the woods in this district always give one the impression of retaining an inordinate reserve of atmospheric moisture. It is this moisture, this ubiquitous dampness, that to a certain type of sun-loving nature makes the region so antipathetic, so disintegrating. Such persons have constantly the feeling of being dragged earthward by some steady centripetal pull, against which they struggle in vain. Earthward they are pulled, and the earth, that seems waiting to receive them, breathes heavy damp breaths of in-drawing voracity, like the mouth of some monster of the slime.