Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  These final words were positively shouted by the enraged Phyllis, as she tripped away, swinging her bundle triumphantly.

  It seemed for a moment as though Gladys meditated a desperate pursuit, and the infliction of physical violence upon her enemy. But Lacrima held her fast by the hand. “For heaven’s sake, cousin,” she whispered, “let her go. Look at those men watching us!”

  Gladys turned; but it was not at the farm-men she looked.

  Across the green towards them came the two Andersens, Luke looking nervous and worried, and his brother gesticulating strangely. The girls remained motionless, neither advancing to meet them nor making any attempt to evade them. Gladys seemed to lose her defiant air, and waited their approach, rather with the look of one expecting to be chidden than of one prepared to chide. On all recent occasions this had been her manner, when in the presence of the young stone-carver.

  The sight of Lacrima seemed to exercise a magical effect upon James Andersen. He ceased at once his excited talk, and advancing towards her, greeted her in his normal tone—a tone of almost paternal gentleness.

  “It is nearly a quarter to one,” said Gladys, addressing both the men. “Lacrima and I’ll have all we can do to get back in time for lunch. Let’s walk back together!”

  Luke looked at his brother who gave him a friendly smile. He also looked sharply at the Hullaway labourers, who were shuffling off towards the barton of the Manor-Farm.

  “I don’t mind,” he said; “though it is a dangerous time of day! But we can go by the fields, and you can leave us at Roandyke Barn.”

  They moved off along the edge of the pond together.

  “It was Lacrima, not I, Luke,” said Gladys presently, “who let that girl out.”

  Luke flicked a clump of dock-weeds with his cane. “It was her own fault,” he said carelessly. “I thought I’d opened the thing. I was called away suddenly.”

  Gladys bowed her head submissively. In the company of the young stone-carver her whole nature seemed to change. A shrewd observer might even have marked a subtle difference in her physical appearance. She appeared to wilt and droop, like a tropical flower transplanted into a northern zone.

  They remained all together until they reached the fields. Then Gladys and Luke dropped behind.

  “I have something I want to tell you,” said the fair girl, as soon as the others were out of hearing. “Something very important.”

  “I have something to tell you too,” answered Luke, “and I think I will tell it first. It is hardly likely that your piece of news can be as serious as mine.”

  They paused at a stile; and the girl made him take her in his arms and kiss her, before she consented to hear what he had to say.

  It would have been noticeable to any observer that in the caresses they exchanged, Luke played the perfunctory, and she the passionate part. She kissed him thirstily, insatiably, with clinging lips that seemed avid of his very soul. When at last they moved on through grass that was still wet with the rain of the night before, Luke drew his hand away from hers, as if to emphasize the seriousness of his words.

  “I am terribly anxious, dearest, about James,” he said. “We had an absurd quarrel this morning, and he rushed off to Hullaway in a rage. I found him in the inn. He had been drinking, but it was not that which upset him. He had not taken enough to affect him in that way. I am very, very anxious about him. I forget whether I’ve ever told you about my mother? Her mind—poor darling—was horribly upset before she died. She suffered from more than one distressing mania. And my fear is that James may go the same way.’

  Gladys hung her head. In a strange and subtle way she felt as though the responsibility of this new catastrophe rested upon her. Her desperate passion for Luke had so unnerved her, that she had become liable to be victimized by any sort of superstitious apprehension.

  “How dreadful!” she whispered, “but he seemed to me perfectly natural just now.”

  “That was Lacrima’s doing,” said Luke. “Lacrima is at the bottom of it all. I wish, oh, I wish, she was going to marry James, instead of that uncle of yours.”

  “Father would never allow that,” said Gladys, raising her head. “He is set upon making her take uncle John. It has become a kind of passion with him. Father is funny in these things.”

  “Still—it might be managed,” muttered Luke thoughtfully, “if we carried it through with a high hand. We might arrange it; the world is malleable, after all. If you and I, my dear, put our heads together, Mr. John Goring might whistle for his bride.”

  “I hate Lacrima!” cried Gladys, with a sudden access of her normal spirit.

  “I don’t care two pence about Lacrima,” returned Luke. “It is of James I am thinking.”

  “But she would be happy with James, and I don’t want her to be happy.”

  “What a little devil you are!” exclaimed the stone-carver, slipping his arm round her waist.

  “Yes, I know I am,” she answered shamelessly. “I suppose I inherit it from father. He hates people just like that. But I am not a devil with you, Luke, am I? I wish I were!” she added, after a little pause.

  “We must think over this business from every point of view,” said Luke solemnly. “I cannot help thinking that if you and I resolve to do it, we can twist the fates round, somehow or another. I am sure Lacrima could save James if she liked. If you could only have seen the difference between what he was when I was called back to him just now, and what he became as soon as he set eyes upon her, you would know what I mean. He is mad about her, and if he doesn’t get her, he’ll go really mad. He was a madman just now. He nearly frightened that fool Titley into a fit.”

  “I don’t want Lacrima to marry James,” burst out Gladys. Luke in a moment drew his arm away, and quickened his pace.

  “As you please,” he said. “But I can promise you this, my friend, that if anything does happen to my brother, it’ll be the end of everything between us.”

  “Why—what—how can you say such dreadful things?” stammered the girl.

  Luke airily swung his stick. “It all rests with you, child. Though we can’t marry, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go on seeing each other, as we do now, forever and ever,—as long as you help me in this affair. But if you’re going to sulk and talk this nonsense about ‘hating’—it is probable that it will be a case of good-bye!”

  The fair girl’s face was distorted by a spasmodic convulsion of conflicting emotions. She bit her lip and hung her head. Presently she looked up again and flung her arms round his neck. “I’ll do anything you ask me, Luke, anything, as long as you don’t turn against me.”

  They walked along for some time in silence, hand in hand, taking care not to lose sight of their two companions who seemed as engrossed as themselves in one another’s society. James Andersen was showing sufficient discretion in avoiding the more frequented foot-paths.

  “Luke”, began the girl at last, “did you really give my ring to Annie Santon?”

  “Luke’s brow clouded in a moment.” Damn your ring!” he cried harshly.” I’ve got other things to think about now than your confounded rings. When people give me presents of that kind,” he added “I take for granted I can do what I like with them.”

  Gladys trembled and looked pitfully into his face.

  “But that girl said,” she murmured—“that factory girl, I mean—that it had been lost in some way; hidden, she said, in some hole in a stone. I can’t believe that you would let me be made a laughing-stock of, Luke dear?”

  “Oh, don’t worry me about that,” replied the stone-carver. “Maybe it is so, maybe it isn’t so; anyway it doesn’t matter a hang.”

  “She said too,” pleaded Gladys in a hesitating voice, “that you and Annie were going to be married.”

  “Ho! ho!” laughed Luke, fumbling with some tightly tied hurdles that barred their way; “so she said that, did she? She must have had her knife into you, our little Phyllis. Well, and what’s to stop me if I did decide to marry
Annie?”

  Gladys gasped and looked at him with a drawn and haggard face. Her beauty was of the kind that required the flush of buoyant spirits to illuminate it. The more her heart ached, the less attractive she became. She was anything but beautiful now; and, as he looked at her, Luke noticed for the first time, how low her hair grew upon her forehead.

  “You wouldn’t think of doing that?” she whispered, in a tone of supplication. He laughed lightly and lifting up her chin made as though he were going to kiss her, but drew back without doing so.

  “Are you going to be good,” he said, “and help me to get Lacrima for James?”

  She threw her arms round him. “I’ll do anything you like—anything,” she repeated, “if you’ll only let me love you!”

  While this conversation was proceeding between these two, a not less interesting clash of divergent emotions was occurring between their friends. The Italian may easily be pardoned if she never for one second dreamed of the agitation in her companion’s mind that had so frightened Luke. James’ manner was in no way different from usual, and though he expressed his feelings in a more unreserved fashion than he had ever done before, Lacrima had been for many weeks expecting some such outbreak.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” he was saying, as he strode by her side. “I had meant never to have told you of this. I had meant to let it die with me, without your ever knowing, but somehow—today—I could not help it.”

  He had confessed to her point blank, and in simple, unbroken words, the secret of his heart, and Lacrima had for some moments walked along with head averted making no response.

  It would not be true to say that this revelation surprised her. It would be completely untrue to say it offended her. It did not even enter her mind that it might have been kinder to have been less friendly, less responsive, than she had been, to this queer taciturn admirer. But circumstances had really given her very little choice in the matter. She had been, as it were, flung perforce upon his society, and she had accepted, as a providential qualification of her loneliness, the fact that he was attracted towards her rather than repelled by her.

  It is quite possible that had he remained untouched by the evasive appeal of her timid grace; had he, for instance, remained a provocative and impenetrable mystery at her side, she might have been led to share his feelings. But, unluckily for poor Andersen, the very fact that his feelings had been disclosed only too clearly, militated hopelessly against such an event. He was no remote, shadowy, romantic possibility to her—a closed casket of wonders, difficult and dangerous to open. He was simply a passionate and assiduous lover. The fact that he could love her, lowered him a little in Lacrima’s esteem. True to her Pariah instincts she felt that such passion was a sign of weakness in him; and if she did not actually despise him for it, it materially lessened the interest she took in the workings of his mind. Maurice Quincunx drew her to him for the very reason that he was so sexless, so cold, so wayward, so full of whimsical caprices. Maurice, a Pariah himself, excited at the same time her maternal tenderness and her imaginative affection. If she did not feel the passion for him that she might have felt for Andersen, had Andersen remained inacessible; that was only because there was something in Maurice’s peculiar egoism which chilled such feelings at their root.

  Another almost equally effective cause of her lack of response to the stone-carver’s emotion was the cynical and world-deep weariness that had fallen upon her, since this dreadful marriage with Goring had become a settled event. Face to face with this, she felt as though nothing mattered very much, and as though any feeling she herself might excite in another person must needs be like the passing of a shadow across a mirror—something vague, unreal, insubstantial—something removed to a remote distance, like the voice of a person at the end of a long tunnel, or as the dream of someone who is himself a figure in a dream. If anyone, she felt, broke into the enchanted circle that surrounded her, it was as if they sought to make overtures to a person dead and buried.

  It was almost with the coldness and detachment of the dead that she now answered him, and her voice went sighing across the wet fields with a desolation that would have struck a more normal mind than Andersen’s as the incarnation of tragedy. He was himself, however, strung up to such a tragic note, that the despair in her tone affected him less than it would have affected another.

  “I have come to feel,” said she, “that I have no heart, and I feel as though this country of yours had no heart. It ought to be always cloudy and dark in this place. Sunshine here is a kind of bitter mockery.”

  “You do not know—you do not know what you say,” cried the poor stone-carver, quickening his pace in his excitement so that it became difficult for her to keep up with him. “I have loved you, since I first saw you—that day—down at our works—when the hawthorn was out. My heart at any rate is deep enough, deep enough to be hurt more than you would believe, Lacrima. Oh, if things were only different! If you could only bring yourself to care for me a little—just a little! Lacrima, listen to me.”

  He stopped abruptly in the middle of a field and made her turn and face him. He laid his hand solemnly and imploringly upon her wrist. “Why need you put yourself under this frightful yoke? I know something of what you have had to go through. I know something, though it may be only a little, of what this horrible marriage means to you. Lacrima, for your own sake—as well as mine—for the sake of everyone who has ever cared for you—don’t let them drag you into this atrocious trap.

  “Trust me, give yourself boldly into my care. Let’s go away together and try our fortune in some new place! All places are not like Nevilton. I am a strong man, I know my trade, I could earn money easily to keep us both. Lacrima, don’t turn away, don’t look so helpless! After all, things might be worse, you might be already married to that man, and be buried alive forever! It is not yet too late. You are still free. I beg and implore you, by everything you hold sacred, to stop and escape before it is too late. It doesn’t matter that you don’t love me now. As long as you don’t utterly hate me all can be put right. I don’t ask you to return what I feel for you. I won’t ask it if you agree to marry me. I’ll make any contract with you you please, and swear any vow. I won’t come near you when we are together. We can live under one roof as brother and sister. The wedding-ring will be nothing between us. It will only protect you from the rest of the world. I won’t interfere with your life at all, when once I have freed you from this devil’s hole. It will only be a marriage in form, in name; everything else will be just as you please. I will obey your least wish, your least fancy. If you want to go back to your own country and to go alone, I will save up money enough to make that possible. In fact, I have now got money enough to pay your journey and I would send out more to you. Lacrima, let me help you to break away from all this. You must, Lacrima, you must and you shall! If you prefer it, we needn’t ever be married. I don’t want to take advantage of you. I’ll give you every penny I have and help you out of the country and then send you more as I earn it. It is madness, this devilish marriage they are driving you into. It is madness and folly to submit to it. It is monstrous. It is ridiculous. You are free to go, they have no hold upon you. Lacrima, Lacrima! why are you so cruel to yourself, to me, to everyone who cares for you?”

  He drew breath at last, but continued to clutch her wrist with a trembling hand, glancing anxiously, as he waited, at the lessening distance that separated them from the others.

  Lacrima looked at him with a pale troubled face, but her large eyes were full of tears and when she spoke her voice quivered.

  “I was wrong, my friend, to say that none of you here had any heart. Your heart is large and noble. I shall never—never forget what you have now said to me. But James—but James, dear,” and her voice shook still more, “I cannot, I cannot do it. There are more reasons than I can explain to you, why this thing must happen. It has to happen, and we must bow our heads and submit. After all, life is not very long, or very happy, at the best. Probab
ly,”—and she smiled a sad little smile,—“I should disappoint you frightfully if we did go together. I am not such a nice person as you suppose. I have queer moods—oh, such strange, strange moods!—and I know for certain that I should not make you happy.

  “Shall I tell you a horrible secret, James?” Here her voice sank into a curious whisper and she laughed a low distressing laugh. “I have really got the soul, the soul I say, not the nerves or sense, of a girl who has lost everything,—I wish I could make you understand—who has lost self-respect and everything,—I have thought myself into this state. I don’t care now—I really don’t—what happens to me. James, dear—you wouldn’t want to marry a person like that, a person who feels herself already dead and buried? Yes, and worse than dead! A person who has lost all pity, all feeling, even for herself. A person who is past even caring for the difference between right and wrong! You wouldn’t want to be kind to a person like that, James, would you?”

  She stopped and gazed into his face, smiling a woeful little smile. Andersen mechanically noticed that their companions had observed their long pause, and had delayed to advance, resting beneath the shelter of a wind-tossed ash-tree. The stone-carver began to realize the extraordinary and terrible loneliness of every human soul. Here he was, face to face with the one being of all beings whose least look or word thrilled him with intolerable excitement, and yet he could not as much as touch the outer margin of her real consciousness.

  He had not the least idea, even at that fatal moment, what her inner spirit was feeling; what thoughts, what sensations, were passing through her soul. Nor could he ever have. They might stand together thus, isolated from all the world, through an eternity of physical contact, and he would never attain such knowledge. She would always remain aloof, mysterious, evasive. He resolved that at all events as far as he himself was concerned, there should be no barrier between them. He would lay open to her the deepest recesses of his heart.