Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  “The stone-carver nodded and hummed a tune. He seemed to intimate with the whole air of his elegant quiescence that the moment had arrived for Mr. Wone’s departure.

  The Nonconformist felt the telepathic pressure of this polite dismissal. He waved his arm. “Good night, then; good night! I am afraid I must postpone my talk with Mr. Clavering till another occasion. Remember the strike, Andersen! That is what I leave in your hands. Remember the strike!”

  The noise of Mr. Wone’s retreating steps was still audible when Luke returned to the stone in the middle of Splash Lane. The sky was clear now and a faint whitish glimmer, shining on the worn surface of the stone, revealed the two deep holes in it, where the fastenings of the chain had hung. The young man tapped the stone with his stick and gave a low whistle. An amorphous heap of clothes, huddled in the hedge, stirred, and emitted a reproachful sound.

  “Oh, you’re there, are you? he said. “What silly nonsense is this? Get up! Let’s see your face!” He stooped and pulled at the object. After a moment’s struggle the flexible form of a young girl emerged into the light. She held down her head and appeared sulky and angry.

  “What’s the matter, Annie?” whispered the youth encircling her with his arms.

  The girl shook him away. “How could you tell Miss Seldom who I was!” she murmured. “How could you do it, Luke? If it had been anybody else—but for her to know——”

  The stone-carver laughed. “Really, child, you are too ridiculous! Why, on earth, shouldn’t she know, more than anyone else?”

  The girl looked fiercely at him. “Because she is good,” she said. “Because she is the only good person in this blasted place!”

  The young man showed no astonishment at this outburst. “Come on, darling,” he rejoined. “We must be getting you home. I daresay, Miss Seldom is all you think. It seemed to me, though, that she was different from usual tonight. But I expect that fool had upset her.”

  He let the young girl lean for a moment against the shadowy stone while he fumbled for his cigarettes and matches. He observed her make a quick movement with her hands.

  “What are you up to now?” he asked.

  She gave a fierce little laugh. “There!” she cried. “I have done it!”

  “What have you done?” he enquired, emitting a puff of smoke, and throwing the lighted match into the hedge.

  She pressed her hands against the stone and looked up at him mischievously and triumphantly. “Look!” she said, holding out her fingers in the darkness. He surveyed her closely. “What is it? Have you scratched yourself?”

  “Light a match and see!” she cried. He lit a match and examined the hand she held towards him.

  “You have thrown away that ring!”

  “Not thrown it away, Luke; not thrown it away! I have pressed it down into this hole. You can’t get it out now! Nobody never can!”

  He held the flickering match closely against the stone’s surface. In the narrow darkness of the aperture she indicated, something bright glittered.

  “But this is really annoying of you, Annie,” said the stone-carver. “I told you that ring was only lent to me. She’ll be asking for it back tomorrow.”

  “Well, you can tell her to come here and get it!”

  “But this is really serious,” protested Luke, trying in vain to reach the object with his outstretched fingers.

  “And I have twisted my hair round it!” the girl went on, in exulting excitement, “I have twisted it tight around. It will be hard to get it off!”

  Luke continued making ineffectual dives into the hole, while she watched him gleefully. He went to the hedge and breaking off a dusty sprig of wound-wort prodded the ring with its stalk.

  “You can’t do it” she cried, “you can’t do it! You’ll only push it further in!”

  “Damn you, Annie!” he muttered. “This is a horrible kind of joke. I tell you, Gladys will want this comfounded thing back tomorrow. She’s already asked me twice for it. She only gave it to me for fun.”

  The girl leaned across the stone towards him, propping herself on the palms of her hands, and laughing mischievously. “No one in this village can get that ring out of there!” she cried; “no one! And when they does, they’ll find it all twisted up with my hair!” She tossed back her black locks defiantly.

  Luke Anderson’s thoughts ran upon scissors, pincers, willow-wands, bramble-thorns, and children’s arms.

  “Leave it then!” he said. “After all, I can swear I lost it. Come on, you little demon!”

  They moved away; and St. Catharine’s church was only striking the hour of nine, when they separated at her mother’s door.

  CHAPTER XV

  MORTIMER ROMER

  THE incredibly halcyon June which had filled the lanes and meadows of Nevilton that summer with such golden weather, gave place at last to July; and with July came tokens of a change.

  The more slow-growing hay-fields were still strewn with their little lines of brown mown grass waiting its hour of “carrying,” but the larger number of the pastures wore now that freshly verdant and yet curiously sad look, which fields in summer wear when they have been shorn of their first harvest. The corn in the arable-lands was beginning to stand high; wheat and barley varying their alternate ripening tints, from the rich gold of the one, to the diaphanous glaucous green, so tender and pallid, of the other. In the hedges, ragwort, knapweed and scabious had completely replaced wild-rose and elder-blossom; and in the ditches and by the margins of ponds, loosestrife and willow-herb were beginning to bud. Even the latest-sprouting among the trees carried now the full heavy burden, dark and monotonous, of the summer’s prime; and the sharp, dry intermittent chirping of warblers, finches and buntings, had long since replaced, in the garden-bushes, the more flute-like cries of the earlier-nesting birds.

  The shadowy woods of the Nevilton valleys, with their thick entangled undergrowth, were less pleasant to walk in than they had been. Tall rank growths choked the wan remnants of the season’s prime; and beneath sombre, indistinguishable foliage, the dry, hard-trodden paths lost their furtive enchantment. Dog-mercury, that delicate child of the under-shadows, was no more now than a gross mass of tarnished leaves. Enchanter’s nightshade took the place of pink-campion; only to yield, in its turn, to viper’s bugloss and flea-bane.

  As the shy gods of the year’s tender birth receded before these ranker maturings, humanity became more prominent. Print-frocked maidens assisted the sheep in treading the slopes of Leo’s Hill into earthy grassless patches. Bits of dirty paper and the litter of careless picnickers strewed the most shadowy recesses. Smart youths flicked town-bought canes in places where, a few weeks before, the squirrel had gambolled undisturbed, and the wood-pecker had deepened the magical silence by his patent labour. Where recently, amid shadowy moss “soft as sleep,” the delicate petals of the fragile wood-sorrel had breathed untroubled in their enchanted aisles of leafy twilight, one found oneself reading, upon torn card-board boxes, highly-coloured messages to the Human Race from energetic Tradesmen. July had replaced June. The gods of Humanity had replaced the gods of Nature; and the interlude between hay-harvest and wheat-harvest had brought the dog-star Sirius into his diurnal ascendance.

  The project of Lacrima’s union with Mr. John Goring remained, so to speak, “in the air.” The village assumed it as a certainty; Mr. Quincunx regarded it as a probability; and Mr. Goring himself, enjoying his yearly session of agreeable leisure, meditated upon it day and night.

  Lacrima had fallen into a curious lassitude with regard to the whole matter. In these July days, especially now that the sky was over-cast by clouds and heavy rains seemed imminent, she appeared to lose all care or interest in her own life. Her mood followed the mood of the weather. If some desperate deluge of disaster was brooding in the distance, she felt tempted to cry out, “Let it fall!”

  Mr. Quincunx’s feelings on the subject remained a mystery to her. He neither seemed definitely to accept her sacrifice, nor to reject it. He did
not really—so she could not help telling herself—visualize the horror of the thing, as it affected her, in any substantial degree. He often made a joke of it; and kept quoting cynical and worldly suggestions, from the lips of Luke Andersen.

  On the other hand, both from Mr. Romer and the farmer, she received quiet, persistent and inexorable pressure; though to do the latter justice, he made no further attempts to treat her roughly or familiarly.

  She had gone so far once—in a mood of panic-stricken aversion, following upon a conversation with Gladys—as actually to walk to the vicarage gate, with the definite idea of appealing to Vennie; but it chanced that in place of Vennie she had observed Mrs. Seldom moving among her flower-beds, and the grave austerity of the aristocratic old lady had taken all resolution from her and made her retrace her steps.

  It must also be confessed that her dislike and fear of Gladys had grown to dimensions bordering upon monomania. The elder girl at once hypnotized and paralyzed her. Her sensuality, her feline caprices, her elaborately cherished hatred, reduced the Italian to such helpless misery, that any change—even the horror of this marriage—assumed the likeness of a desirable relief.

  It is also true that by gradual degrees,—for women, however little prone to abstract thought, are quick to turn the theories of those they love into living practice,—she had come to regard the mere physical terror of this momentous plunge as a less insurmountable barrier than she had felt at first. Without precisely intending it, Mr. Quincunx had really, in a measure—particularly since he himself had come to frequent the society of Luke Andersen—achieved what might have conventionally been called the “corruption” of Lacrima’s mind. She found herself on several occasions imagining what she would really feel, if, escaped for an afternoon from her Priory duties, she were slipping off to meet her friend in Camel’s Cover or Badger’s Bottom.

  When the suggestion had been first made to her of this monstrous marriage, it had seemed nothing short of a sentence of death, and beyond the actual consummation of it, she had never dreamed of looking. But all this had now imperceptibly changed. Many an evening as she sat with her work by Mrs. Romer’s side, watching Gladys and her father play cards, the thought came over her that she might just as well enjoy the comparative independence of having her own house and her own associations—even though the price of them were the society of such a lump of clay—as live this wretched half-life without hope or aim.

  Other moods arrived when the thought of having children of her own came to her with something more than a mere sense of escape; came to her with the enlargement of an opening horizon. She recalled the many meandering discourses which Mr. Quincunx had addressed to her upon this subject. They had not affected her woman’s instincts; but they had lodged in her mind. A girl’s children, so her friend had often maintained, do not belong to the father at all. The father is nothing—a mere irrelevant incident, a mere chance. The mother alone—the mother always—has the rights and pleasures, as she has the responsibilities and pains of the parental relation. She even recalled one occasion of twilight philosophizing in the potato-bed, when Mr. Quincunx had gone so far as to maintain the unscientific thesis that children, born where there is no love, inherit character, appearance, tastes, everything—from the mother.

  Lacrima had a dim suspicion that some of these less pious theories were due to the perverse Luke, who, as the cloudier July days overcast his evening rambles, had acquired the habit of strolling at night-fall into Mr. Quincunx’s kitchen. Once indeed she was certain she discerned the trail of this plausible heathen in her friend’s words. Mr. Quincunx, with one of his peculiarly goblin-like leers, had intimated—in jest indeed, but with a searching look into her face that it would be no very difficult task to deceive,—in shrewd Panurgian roguery, this clumsy clown. His words at the time had hurt and shocked her; and her reaction from them had led to the spoiling of a pleasant conversation; but they invaded afterwards, more deeply than she would have cared to confess, her hours of dreamy solitude.

  Her southern imagination, free from both the grossness and the hypocrisy of the Nevilton mind, was much readier to wander upon an antinomian path—at least in its wayward fancies—than it would have been, had circumstances not led her away from her inherited faith.

  While the sensuality of Gladys left her absolutely untouched, the anarchistic theories of her friend—especially now they had been fortified and directed by the insidious Luke—gave her intelligence many queer and lawless topics of solitary brooding. Her senses, her instincts, were as pure and unsophisticated as ever; but her conscience was besieged and threatened. It was indeed a queer rôle—this, which fate laid upon Mr. Quincunx—the rôle of undermining the reluctance of his own sweetheart to make a loveless marriage—but it was one for which his curious lack of physical passion singularly fitted him.

  Had Vennie Seldom or Hugh Clavering been aware of the condition of affairs they would have condemned Mr. Quincunx in the most wholesale manner. Clavering would probably have been tempted to apply to him some of the most abusive language in the dictionary. But it is extremely questionable whether this judgment of theirs would have been justified.

  A more enlightened planetary observer, initiated into the labyrinthine hearts of men, might well have pointed out that Mr. Quincunx’s theories were largely a matter of pure speculation, humorously remote from any contact with reality. He might also have reminded these indignant ones that Mr. Quincunx quite genuinely laboured under the illusion—if it were an illusion—that for his friend to be mistress of the Priory and free of her dependence on the Romers was a thing eminently desirable, and worth the price she paid for it. Such an invisible clairvoyant might even have surmised, what no one in Nevilton who knew of. Mr. Romer’s offer would for one second have believed; namely, that he would have given her the same advice had there been no such offer, simply on the general ground of binding her permanently to the place.

  The fact, however, remained, that by adopting this ambiguous and evasive attitude Mr. Quincunx reduced the more heroic and romantic aspect of the girl’s sacrifice to the lowest possible level, and flung her into a mood of reckless and spiritless indifference. She was brought to the point of losing all interest in her own fate and of simply relapsing upon the tide of events.

  It was precisely to this condition that Mr. Homer had desired to bring her. When she had first attracted him, and had fallen into his hands, there had been certain psychological contests between them, in which the quarry-owner had by no means emerged victorious. It was the rankling memory of these contests—contests spiritual rather than material—which had issued in his gloomy hatred of her and his longing to corrupt her mind and humiliate her soul. This corruption, this humiliation had been long in coming. It had seemed out of his own power and out of the power of his feline daughter to bring it about; but this felicitous plan of using the girl’s own friend to assist her moral disentegration appeared to have changed the issue very completely.

  Mr. Romer, watching her from day to day, became more and more certain that her integral soul, the inmost fortress of her self-respect, was yielding inch by inch. She had flung the rudder down; and was drifting upon the tide.

  It might have been a matter of surprise to some ill-judging psychologists that a Napoleonic intriguer, of the quarry-owner’s type, should ever have entered upon a struggle apparently so unequal and unimportant as that for the mere integrity of a solitary girl’s spirit. Such a judgment would display little knowledge of the darker possibilities of human character. Resistance is resistance, from whatever quarter it comes; and the fragile soul of a helpless Pariah may be just as capable of provoking the aggressive instincts of a born master of men as the most obdurate of commercial rivals.

  There are certain psychic oppositions to our will, which, when once they have been encountered, remain indelibly in the memory as a challenge and a defiance, until their provocation has been wiped out in their defeat. It matters nothing that such oppositions should spring from weak or triflin
g quarters. We have been baffled, thwarted, fooled; and we cannot recover the feeling of identity with ourselves, until, like a satisfied tidal wave, our will has drowned completely the barricades that defied it. It matters nothing if at the beginning, what we were thwarted by was a mere trifle, a straw upon the wind, a feather in the breeze. The point is that our will, in flowing outwards, at its capricious pleasure, met with opposition—met with resistance. We do not really recover our self-esteem until every memory of such an event has been obliterated by a complete revenge.

  It is useless to object that a powerful ambitious man of the Romer mould, contending Atlas-like under a weight of enormous schemes, was not one to harbour such long-lingering rancour against a mere Pariah. There was more in the thing than appears on the surface. The brains of mortal men are queer crucibles, and the smouldering fires that heat them are driven by capricious and wanton guests. Lacrima’s old defeat of the owner of Leo’s Hill—a defeat into which there is no need to descend now, for its “terrain” was remote from our present stage—had been a defeat upon what might be called a subliminal or interior plane.

  It was almost as if he had encountered her and she had encountered him, not only in the past of this particular life, but a remoter past—in a past of some pre-natal incarnation. There are—as is well-known, many instances of this unfathomable conflict between certain human types—types that seem to find one another, that seem to be drawn to one another, by some pre-ordained necessity in the occult influences of mortal fate. It matters nothing in regard to such a conflict, that on one side should be strength, power and position, and on the other weakness and helplessness. The soul is the soul, and has its own laws.