Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  Mr. Taxater was silent, fingering the gold cross upon his watch-chain.

  “It remains with yourself then,” he remarked at last.

  “What!” cried the astonished Luke.

  “I happen to be aware,” continued the diplomatist, calmly, “that there is a certain fact which our friend from Ohio would give half his fortune to know. He certainly would very willingly sign the little document for it, that would put Mr. Quincunx and Miss Traffio into a position of complete security. It is only a question of ‘the terrain of negotiation,’ as we say in our ecclesiastical circles.”

  Luke Andersen’s eyes opened very widely, and the amazement of his surprise made him look more like an astounded faun than ever—a faun that has come bolt upon some incredible triumph of civilization.

  “I will be quite plain with you, young man,” said the theologian. “It has come to my knowledge that you and Gladys Homer are more than friends; have been more than friends, for a good while past.

  “Do not wave your hand in that way! I am not speaking without evidence. I happen to know as a positive fact that this girl is neither more nor less than your mistress. I am also inclined to believe—though of this, of course, I cannot be sure—that, as a result of this intrigue, she is likely, before the autumn is over, to find herself in a position of considerable embarrassment. It is no doubt, with a view to covering such embarrassment—you understand what I mean, Mr. Andersen?—that she is making preparations to have her marriage performed earlier than was at first intended.”

  “God!” cried the astounded youth, losing all self-possession, “how, under the sun, did you get to know this?”

  Mr. Taxater smiled. “We poor controversialists,” he said, “have to learn, in self-defence, certain innocent arts of observation. I don’t think that you and your mistress,” he added, “have been so extraordinarily discreet, that it needed a miracle to discover your secret.”

  Luke Andersen recovered his equanimity with a vigorous effort. “Well?” he said, rising from his seat and looking anxiously at his brother, “what then?”

  As he uttered these words the young stone-carver’s mind wrestled in grim austerity with the ghastly hint thrown out by his companion. He divined with an icy shock of horror the astounding proposal that this amazing champion of the Faith was about to unfold. He mentally laid hold of this proposal as a man might lay hold upon a red-hot bar of iron. The interior fibres of his being hardened themselves to grasp without shrinking its appalling treachery.

  Luke had it in him, below his urbane exterior, to rend and tear away every natural, every human scruple. He had it in him to be able to envisage, with a shamelessness worthy of some lost soul of the Florentine’s Inferno, the fire-scorched walls of such a stark dilemma. The palpable suggestion which now hung, as it were, suspended in the air between them, was a suggestion he was ready to grasp by the throat.

  The sight of his brother’s gaunt figure, every line of which he knew and loved so well, turned his conscience to adamant. Sinking into the depths of his soul, as a diver might sink into an ice-cold sea, he felt that there was literally nothing he would not do, if his dear Daddy James could be restored to sanity and happiness.

  Gladys? He would walk over the bodies of a hundred Gladyses, if that way, and that alone, led to his brother’s restoration!

  “What then?” he repeated, turning a bleak but resolute face upon Mr. Taxater.

  The theologian continued: “Why, it remains for you, or for someone deputed by you, to reveal to our unsuspecting American exactly how his betrothed has betrayed him. I have no doubt that in the disturbance this will cause him we shall have no difficulty in securing his aid in this other matter. It would be a natural, an inevitable revenge for him to take. Himself a victim of these Romers, what more appropriate, what more suitable, than that he should help us in liberating their other victims? If he is as wealthy as you say, it would be a mere bagatelle for him to set our good Quincunx upon his feet forever, and Lacrima with him! It is the kind of thing it would naturally occur to him to do. It would be a revenge; but a noble revenge. He would leave Nevilton then, feeling that he had left his mark; that he had made himself felt. Americans like to make themselves felt.”

  Luke’s countenance, in spite of his interior acquiescence, stiffened into a haggard mask of dismay.

  “But this is beyond anything one has ever heard of!” he protested, trying in vain to assume an air of levity. “It is beyond everything. Actually to convey, to the very man one’s girl is going to marry, the news of her seduction! Actually to ‘coin her for drachmas,’ as it says somewhere! It’s a monstrous thing, an incredible thing!”

  “Not a bit more monstrous than your original sin in seducing the girl,” said Mr. Taxater.

  “That is the usual trick,” he went on sternly, “of you English people! You snatch at your little pleasures, without any scruple, and feel yourselves quite honourable. And then, directly it becomes a question of paying for them, by any form of public confession, you become fastidiously scrupulous.”

  “But to give one’s girl away, to betray her in this shameless manner oneself! It seems to me the ultimate limit of scurvy meanness!”

  “It only seems to you so, because the illusion of chivalry enters into it; in other words, because public opinion would condemn you! This honourable shielding of the woman we have sinned with, at every kind of cost to others, has been the cause of endless misery. Do you think you are preparing a happy marriage for your Gladys in your ‘honourable’ reticence? By saving her from this union with Mr. Dangelis—whom, by the way, she surely cannot love, if she loves you—you will be doing her the best service possible. Even if she refuses to make you her husband in his place—and I suppose her infatuation would stop at that!—there are other ways, besides marriage, of hiding her embarrassed condition. Let her travel for a year till her trouble is well over!”

  Luke Andersen reflected in silence, his drooping figure indicating a striking collapse of his normal urbanity.

  At last he spoke. “There may be something in what you suggest,” he remarked slowly. “Obviously, I can’t be the one,” he added, after a further pause, “to strike this astounding bargain with the American.”

  “I don’t see why not,” said the theologian, with a certain maliciousness in his tone, “I don’t see why not. You have been the one to commit the sin; you ought naturally to be the one to perform the penance.”

  The luckless youth distorted his countenance into such a wry grimace, that he caused it to resemble the stone gargoyles which protruded their lewd tongues from the church roof above them.

  “It’s a scurvy thing to do, all the same,” he muttered.

  “It is only relatively—’ scurvy,’ as you call it,” replied Mr. Taxater. “In an absolute sense, the ‘scurviness’ would be to let your Gladys deceive an honest man and make herself unhappy for life, simply to save you two from any sort of exposure. But as a matter of fact, I am not inclined to place this very delicate piece of negotiation in your hands. It would be so fatally easy for you—under the circumstances—to make some precipitate blunder that would spoil it all.”

  “Don’t think,” he went on, observing the face of his interlocutor relapsing into sudden cheerfulness, “that I let you off this penance because of its unchivalrous character. You break the laws of chivalry quite as completely by putting me into the possession of the facts.

  “I shall, of course,” he added, “require from you some kind of written statement. The thing must be put upon an unimpeachable ground.”

  Luke Andersen’s relief was not materially modified by this demand. He began to fumble in his pocket for his cigarette-case.

  “The great point to be certain of,” continued Mr. Taxater, “is that Quincunx and Lacrima will accept the situation, when it is thus presented to them. But I don’t think we need anticipate any difficulty. In case of Dangelis’ saying anything to Mr. Romer, though I do not for a moment imagine he will, it would be well if you and your
brother were prepared to move, if need were, to some other scene of action. There is plenty of demand for skilled workmen like yourselves, and you have no ties here.”

  The young man made a deprecatory movement with his hands.

  “We neither of us should like that, very much, sir. James and I are fonder of Nevilton than you might imagine.”

  “Well, well,” responded the theologian, “we can discuss that another time. Such a thing may not be necessary. I am glad to see, my friend,” he added, “that whatever wrong you have done, you are willing to atone for it. So I trust our little plan will work out successfully. Perhaps you will look in, tomorrow night? I shall be at leisure then, and we can make our arrangements. Well, Heaven protect you, ‘a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris.’”

  He crossed himself devoutly as he spoke, and giving the young man a friendly wave of the hand, and an encouraging smile, let himself out through the gate and proceeded to follow the patient Vennie.

  He overtook his little friend somewhere not far from the lodge of that admirable captain, whose neatly-cut laurel hedge had witnessed, according to the loquacious Mrs. Fringe, the strange encounter between Jimmy Pringle and his Maker. Vennie was straying slowly along by the hedge-side, trailing her hand through the tall dead grasses. Hearing Mr. Taxater’s footsteps, she turned eagerly to meet him.

  “Well,” she asked, “what does Luke say about his brother? Is it as bad as we feared?”

  “He doesn’t think,” responded the theologian, “any more than I do, that the thing has gone further than common hallucination.”

  “And Lacrima—poor little Lacrima!—have you decided what we must do to intervene in her case?”

  “I think it may be said,” responded the scholar gravely, “that we have hit upon an effective way of stopping that marriage. But perhaps it would be pleasanter and easier for you to remain at present in ignorance of our precise plan. I know,” he added, smiling, “you do not care for hidden conspiracies.”

  Vennie frowned. “I don’t see why,” she said, “there should be anything hidden about it! It seems to me, the thing is so abominable, that one would only have to make it public, to put an end to it completely.

  “I hope”—she clasped her hands—“I do hope, you are not fighting the evil one with the weapons of the evil one? If you are, I am sure it will end unhappily. I am sure and certain of it!”

  She spoke with a fervour that seemed almost prophetic; and as she did so, she unconsciously waved—with a pathetic little gesture of protest—the bunch of dead grasses which she held in her hand.

  Mr. Taxater walked gravely by her side; his profile, in its imperturbable immobility, resembling the mask of some great mediæval ecclesiastic. The only reply he made to her appeal was to quote the famous Psalmodic invocation: “Nisi Dominus œdificaverit domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui œdificant eam.”

  It would have been clear to anyone who had overheard his recent conversation with Luke, and now watched his reception of Vennie’s instinctive protest, that whatever the actions of this remarkable man were, they rested upon a massive foundation of unshakable philosophy.

  There was little further conversation between them; and at the vicarage gate, they separated with a certain air of estrangement. With undeviating feminine clairvoyance, Vennie was persuaded in the depths of her mind that whatever plan had been hit upon by the combined wits of the theologian and Luke, it was one whose nature, had she known it, would have aroused her most vehement condemnation. Nor in this persuasion will the reader of our curious narrative regard her as far astray from the truth.

  Meanwhile the two brothers were also returning slowly along the road to Nevilton. Had Mr. Clavering, whose opinion of the younger stone-carver was probably lower than that of any of his other critics, seen Luke during this time, he might have formed a kindlier judgment of him. Nothing could have exceeded the tact and solicitude with which he guided the conversation into safe channels. Nothing could have surpassed, in affectionate tenderness, the quick, anxious glances he every now and then cast upon his brother. There are certain human expressions which flit suddenly across the faces of men and women, which reveal, with the seal of absolute authenticity, the depth of the emotion they betray. Such a flitting expression, of a love almost maternal in its passionate depth, crossed the face of Luke Andersen at more than one stage of their homeward walk.

  James seemed, on the whole, rather better than earlier in the day. The most ominous thing he did was to begin a long incoherent discourse about the rooks which kept circling over their heads on their way to the tall trees of Wild Pine. But this particular event of the rooks’ return to their Nevilton roosting-place was a phase of the local life of that spot calculated to impress even perfectly sane minds with romantic suggestion. It was always a sign of the breaking up of the year’s pristine bloom when they came, a token of the not distant approach of the shorter equinoctial days. They flew hither, these funereal wayfarers, from far distant feeding-grounds. They did not nest in the Nevilton woods. Nevilton was to them simply a habitation of sleep. Many of them never even saw it, except in its morning and evening twilight. The place drew them to it at night-fall, and rejected them at sunrise. In the interval they remained passive and unconscious—huddled groups of black obscure shapes, tossed to and fro in their high branches, their glossy heads full of dreams beyond the reach of the profoundest sage. Before settling down to rest, however, it was their custom, even on the stormiest evenings, to sweep round, above the roofs of the village, in wide airy circles of restless flight, uttering their harsh familiar cries. Sailing quietly on a peaceful air or roughly buffeted by rainy gusts of wind—those westerly winds that are so wild and intermittent in this corner of England—these black tribes of the twilight give a character to their places of favourite resort which resembles nothing else in the world. The cawing of rooks is like the crying of sea-gulls. It is a sound that more than anything flings the minds of men back to “old unhappy far-off things.”

  The troubled soul of the luckless stone-carver went tossing forth on this particular night of embalmed stillness, driven in the track of those calmly circling birds, on the gust of a thought-tempest more formidable than any that the fall of the leaves could bring. But the devoted passion of the younger brother followed patiently every flight it took; and by the time they had reached the vicarage-gate, and turned down the station-hill towards their lodging, the wild thoughts had fallen into rest, and like the birds in the dusk of their sheltering branches, were soothed into blessed forgetfulness.

  Luke had recourse, before they reached their dwelling, to the magic of old memories; and the end of that unforgettable day was spent by the two brothers in summoning up childish recollections, and in evoking the images and associations of their earliest compacts of friendship.

  When he left his brother asleep and stood for a while at the open window, Luke prayed a vague heathen prayer to the planetary spaces above his head. A falling star happened to sweep downward at that moment behind the dark pyramid of Nevilton Mount, and this natural phenomenon seemed to his excited nerves a sort of elemental answer to his invocation; as if it had been the very bolt of Sagittarius, the Archer, aimed at all the demons that darkened his brother’s soul!

  CHAPTER XVIII

  VOICES BY THE WAY

  THE morning which followed James Andersen’s completion of his work in Athelston church-porch, was one of the loveliest of the season. The sun rose into a perfectly cloudless sky. Every vestige of mist had vanished, and the half-cut cornfields lay golden and unshadowed in the translucent air. Over the surface of every upland path, the little waves of palpable ether vibrated and quivered. The white roads gleamed between their tangled hedges as if they had been paved with mother-of-pearl. The heat was neither oppressive nor sultry. It penetrated without burdening, and seemed to flow forth upon the earth, as much from the general expanse of the blue depths as from the limited circle of the solar luminary.

  James Andersen seemed m
ore restored than his brother had dared to hope. They went to their work as usual; and from the manner in which the elder stone-carver spoke to his mates and handled his tools, none would have guessed at the mad fancies which had so possessed him during the previous days.

  Luke was filled with profound happiness and relief. It is true that, like a tiny cloud upon the surface of this clear horizon, the thought of his projected betrayal of his mistress remained present with him. But in the depths of his heart he knew that he would have betrayed twenty mistresses, if by that means the brother of his soul could be restored to sanity.

  He had already grown completely weary of Gladys. The clinging and submissive passion with which the proud girl had pursued him of late had begun to irritate his nerves. More than once—especially when her importunities interrupted his newer pleasures—he had found himself on the point of hating her. He was absolutely cynical—and always had been—with regard to the ideal of faithfulness in these matters. Even the startling vision of the indignant Dangelis putting into her hands—as he supposed the American might naturally do—the actual written words with which he betrayed her, only ruffled his equanimity in a remote and even half-humorous manner. He recalled her contemptuous treatment of him on the occasion of their first amorous encounter and it was not without a certain malicious thrill of triumph that he realized how thoroughly he had been revenged.

  He had divined without difficulty on the occasion of their return from Hullaway that Gladys was on the point of revealing to him the fact that she was likely to have a child; and since that day he had taken care to give her little opportunity for such revelations. Absorbed in anxiety for James, he had been anxious to postpone this particular crisis between them till a later occasion.

  The situation, nevertheless, whenever he had thought of it, had given him, in spite of its complicated issues, an undeniable throb of satisfaction. It was such a complete, such a triumphant victory, over Mr. Romer. Luke in his heart had an unblushing admiration for the quarry-owner, whose masterly attitude towards life was not so very different from his own. But this latent respect for his employer rather increased than diminished his complacency in thus striking him down. The remote idea that, in the whirligig of time, an offspring of his own should come to rule in Nevilton house—as seemed by no means impossible, if matters were discreetly managed—was an idea that gave him a most delicate pleasure.