Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  “What two girls?” enquired Vennie.

  “Didn’t you see them?” muttered the clergyman crossly. “The Bristow girl and little Phyllis Santon. They were hanging about, waiting for him.”

  “I’m sure you are quite wrong,” replied Vennie. “Luke may have his faults, but he is devoted—madly devoted—to his brother.”

  “Not at all,” cried Clavering almost rudely. “I know the man better than you do. He is entirely selfish. He is a selfish, sensual pleasure-seeker! He may be fond of his brother in his fashion, just because he is his brother, and they have the same tastes; but his one great aim is his own pleasure. He has been the worst influence I have had to contend with, in this whole village, for some time back!”

  His voice trembled with rage as he spoke. It was impossible, even for the guileless Vennie, not to help wondering in her mind whether the violence of her friend’s reprobation was not impelled by an emotion more personal than public. Her unlucky knowledge of what the nature of such an emotion might be did not induce her to yield meekly to his argument.

  “I don’t believe he saw the people you speak of any more than I did,” she said.

  “Saw them?” cried the priest wrathfully, quickening his pace, as Andersen disappeared round the corner of the road, so that Vennie had to trot by his side like a submissive child. “I saw the look he fixed on them. I know that look of his! I tell you he is the kind of man that does harm wherever he goes. He’s a lazy, sensual, young scoundrel. He ought to be kicked out of the place.”

  Vennie sighed deeply. Life in the world of men was indeed a complicated and entangled matter. She had turned, in her agitation about the stone-carver, and in her reaction from Mr. Taxater’s reserve, straight to the person she loved best of all; and this was her reward,—a mere crude outburst of masculine jealousy!

  They rounded the corner by her own gate, where the road to Athelston deviates at right angles. James Andersen was no longer in sight.

  “Where the devil has the man got to?” cried the astonished clergyman, raging at himself for his ill-temper, and raging at Vennie for having been the witness of it.

  The girl glanced up the Athelston road; and hastening, forward a few paces, scanned the stately slope of the Nevilton west drive. The unfortunate man was nowhere to be seen.

  From where they now stood, the whole length of the village street was visible, almost as far as the Goat and Boy. It was full of holiday-making young people, but there was no sign of Andersen’s tall and unmistakable figure.

  “Oh, this is dreadful!” cried Vennie. “What are we to do? Where can he have gone?”

  Hugh Clavering looked angrily round. He was experiencing that curious sense, which comes to the best of men sometimes, of being the special and selected object of providential mockery.

  “There are only two ways,” he said. “Either he’s slipped down through the orchards, along your wall, or he’s made off to Nevilton Mount! If that’s what he’s done, he must be now behind that hedge, over there. We should see him otherwise.”

  Vennie gazed anxiously in the direction indicated. “He can’t have gone into our garden?” she said. “No, he’d never do that! He talked about air and hills. I expect he’s where you say. Shall we go on?”

  They hurried down the road until they reached a gate, on the further side of the hedge which ran to the base of Nevilton Mount. Here they entered the field. There was no sign of the fugitive; but owing to certain inequalities in the ground, and the intervention of some large elm-trees, it was still quite possible that he was only a few hundred yards in front of them. They followed the line of the hedge with all the haste they could; trusting, at every turn it made, that they would discover him. In this manner they very soon arrived at the base of the hill.

  “I feel sure he’s somewhere in front of us!” muttered Clavering. “How annoying it is! It was outrageous of that young scoundrel to let him go like this;—wandering about the country in that mad state! If he comes to any harm, I shall see to it that that young man is held responsible.”

  “Quick!” sighed Vennie breathlessly, “we’d better climb straight to the top. We must find him there!”

  They scrambled over the bank and proceeded to make their way as hurriedly as they could through the entangled undergrowth. Hot and exhausted they emerged at last upon the level summit. Here, the grotesque little tower mocked at them with its impassive grey surface. There was no sign of the man they sought; but seated on the grass with their backs to the edifice were the figures of the complacent Mr. Wone and one of his younger children, engaged in the agreeable occupation of devouring a water-melon. The mouth and chin of the Christian Candidate were bespattered with the luscious juice of this delectable fruit, and laid out carefully upon a magazine on his knees, was a pleasing arrangement of rind-peelings and well-sucked pips.

  Mr. Wone waved his hand in polite acknowledgment of Clavering’s salute. He removed his hat to Vennie, but apologized for not rising. “Taking a little holiday, you observe!” he remarked with a satisfied smile. “I see you also are inclined to make the most of this lovely summer day.”

  “You haven’t by any chance seen the elder Andersen, have you?” enquired Clavering.

  “Not a bit of it,” replied the recumbent man. “I suppose I cannot offer you a piece of melon, Miss Seldom?”

  The two baffled pursuers looked at one another in hopeless disappointment.

  “We’ve lost him,” muttered the priest. “He must have gone through your orchard after all.”

  Mr. Wone did not miss this remark. “You were looking for our good James? No. We haven’t seen anything of him. No doubt he is with his brother somewhere. I believe they usually spend their Saturdays out at Hullaway.”

  “When does the election come off, Mr. Wone?” enquired Vennie, hastily, extremely unwilling that her tactless companion should disclose the purpose of their search.

  “In a week’s time from next Monday,” replied the Candidate. “This will be my last free day till then. I have to make thirty speeches during the next seven days. Our cause goes well. I believe, with God’s great help, we are practically certain of victory. It will be a great event, Miss Seldom, a great event.”

  Mr. Clavering made a hopeless sign to Vennie, indicative of the uselessness of any further steps to retake the runaway.

  “I think your side will win in the country generally,” he remarked. “As to this district, I cannot tell. Mr. Romer has strengthened himself considerably by his action after the strike.”

  The candidate placed a carefully selected piece of fruit in his mouth, and called to his little boy, who was scratching his initials with a knife upon the base of the tower.

  “He will be beaten all the same,” he said. “He is bound to be beaten. The stars in their courses must fight against a man like that. I feel it in the air; in the earth; in these beautiful trees. I feel it everywhere. He has challenged stronger powers than you or me. He has challenged the majesty of God Himself. I’ll give you the right”—he went on in a voice that mechanically assumed a preacher’s tone—“to call me a liar and a false prophet, if by this time, in ten days, the oppressor of the poor does not find himself crushed and beaten!”

  “I am afraid right and wrong are more strangely mixed in this world than all that, Mr. Wone,” Vennie found herself saying, with a little weary glance over the wide sun-bathed valleys extended at their feet.

  “Pardon me, pardon me, young lady,” cried the Candidate. “In this great cause there can be no doubt, no question, no ambiguity. The evolution of the human race has reached a point when the will of God must reveal itself in the triumph of love and liberty. Nothing else matters. All turns upon this. That is why I feel that my campaign is more than a political struggle. It is a religious struggle, and on our side are the great moral forces that uphold the world!”

  Vennie’s exhausted nerves completely broke down upon this.

  “Shall we go?” she said, touching her companion on the sleeve.


  Clavering nodded, and bade the melon-eater “good afternoon,” with a brusque gesture.

  As they went off, he turned on his heel. “The will of God, Mr. Wone, is only to be found in the obedient reception of His sacraments.”

  The Christian candidate opened his mouth with amazement. “Those young people,” he thought to himself, “are up to no good. They’ll end by becoming papists, if they go on like this. Its extraordinary that the human mind should actually prefer slavery to freedom!”

  Meanwhile the man whose mysterious evasion of his pursuers had resulted in this disconcerting encounter was already well-advanced on his way towards the Wild Pine ridge. He had, as a matter of fact, crossed the field between the west drive and the Vicarage-garden, and skirting the orchards below Nevilton House, had plunged into the park.

  A vague hope of meeting Lacrima—an instinctive rather than a conscious feeling—had led him in this direction. Once in the park, the high opposing ridge, crowned with its sentinel-line of tall Scotch-firs, arrested his attention and drew him towards it. He crossed the Yeoborough road and ascended the incline of Dead Man’s Lane.

  As he passed the cottage of his rival, he observed Mr. Quincunx energetically at work in his garden. On this occasion the recluse was digging up, not weeds, but young potatoes. He was in his shirt-sleeves and looked hot and tired.

  Andersen leaned upon the little gate and observed him with curious interest. “Why isn’t she here?” he muttered to himself. Then, after a pause: “He is an ash-root. Let him drag that house down! Why doesn’t he drag it down, with all its heavy stones? And the Priory too? And the Church;—yes; and the Church too! He burrows like a root. He looks like a root. I must tell him all these things. I must tell him why he has been chosen, and I have been rejected!” He opened the gate forthwith and advanced towards the potato-digger.

  Mr. Quincunx might have struck the imagination of a much less troubled spirit than that of the poor stone-carver as having a resemblance to a root. His form was at once knotted and lean, fibrous and delicate. His face, by reason of his stooping position, was suffused with a rich reddish tint, and his beard was dusty and unkempt. He rose hastily, on observing his visitor.

  “People like you and me, James, are best by ourselves at these holiday-times,” was his inhospitable greeting. “You can help me with my potatoes if you like. Or you can tell me your news as I work. Or do you want to ask me any question?”

  He uttered these final words in such a tone as the Delphic oracle might have used, when addressing some harassed refugee.

  “Has she been up here today?” said the stone-carver.

  “I like the way you talk,” replied the other. “Why should we mention their names? When I say people, I mean girls. When I say persons, I mean girls. When I say young ladies, I mean girls. And when you say ‘she’ you mean our girl.”

  “Yours!” cried the demented man; “she is yours—not ours. She is weighed down by this evil Stone,—weighed down into the deep clay. What has she to do with me, who have worked at the thing so long?”

  Mr. Quincunx leant upon his hoe and surveyed the speaker. It occurred to him at once that something was amiss. “Good Lord!” he thought to himself, “the fellow has been drinking. I must get him out of this garden as quickly as possible.”

  “She loves you,” Andersen went on, “because you are like a root. You go deep into the earth and no stone can resist you. You twine and twine and twine, and pull them all down. They are all haunted places, these houses and churches; all haunted and evil! They make a man’s head ache to live in them. They put voices into a man’s ears. They are as full of voices as the sea is full of waves.”

  “You are right there, my friend,” replied Mr. Quincunx. “It’s only what I’ve always said. Until people give up building great houses and great churches, no one will ever be happy. We ought to live in bushes and thickets, or in tents. My cottage is no better than a bush. I creep into it at night, and out again in the morning. If its thatch fell on my head I should hardly feel it.”

  “You wouldn’t feel it, you wouldn’t!” cried the stone-carver. “And the reason of that is, that you can burrow like a root. I shouldn’t feel it either, but for a different reason.”

  “I expect you’d better continue your walk,” remarked Mr. Quincunx. “I never fuss myself about people who come to see me. If they come, they come. And when they go, they go.”

  The stone-carver sighed and looked round him. The sun gleamed graciously upon the warm earth, danced and sparkled upon the windows of the cottage, and made the beads of sweat on Mr. Quincunx’s brow shine like diamonds.

  “Do you think,” he said, while the potato-digger turned to his occupation, “that happiness or unhappiness predominates in this world?”

  “Unhappiness!” cried the bearded man, glaring at his acquaintance with the scowl of a goblin. “Unhappiness! Unhappiness! Unhappiness! That is why the only wise way to live is to avoid everything. That’s what I always do. I avoid people, I avoid possessions, I avoid quarrels, I avoid lust, and I avoid love! My life consists in the art of avoiding things.”

  “She doesn’t want happiness,” pleaded the obsessed stone-carver. “And her love is enough. She only wants to escape.”

  “Why do you keep bringing Lacrima in?” cried the recluse. “She is going to marry John Goring. She is going to be mistress of the Priory.”

  A convulsive shock of fury flashed across the face of Andersen. He made a movement that caused his interlocutor to step hurriedly backwards. But the emotion passed as rapidly as it had come.

  “You would avoid everything,” he said cunningly. “You would avoid everything you hate, if someone—myself for instance—or Luke—made it easy for you to save her from these houses and these churches! Luke will arrange it. He is not like us. He is wise. He knows the world. And you will only have to go on just as before, to burrow and twine! But you’ll have done it. You’ll have saved her from them. And then it will not matter how deep they bury me in the quarries of Leo’s Hill!”

  “Is he drunk? Or is he not drunk?” Mr Quincunx wondered. The news of Andersen’s derangement, though it had already run like wild-fire through the village, had not yet reached his ears. For the last few days he had walked both to and from his office, and had talked to no one.

  A remarkable peculiarity in this curious potato-digger was, however, his absolute and unvarying candour. Mr. Quincunx was prepared to discuss his most private concerns with any mortal or immortal visitor who stepped into his garden. He would have entered into a calm philosophical debate upon his love-affairs with a tramp, with a sailor, with the postman, with the chimney-sweep, with the devil; or, as in this case, with his very rival in his sweetheart’s affection! There was really something touching and sublime about this tendency of his. It indicated the presence, in Mr. Quincunx, of a certain mystical reverence for simple humanity, which completely contradicted his misanthropic cynicism.

  “Certainly,” he remarked, on this occasion, forgetting, in his interest in the subject, the recent strange outburst of his companion. “Certainly, if Lacrima and I had sufficient money to live upon, I would be inclined to risk marrying. You would advise me to, then; wouldn’t you, Andersen? Anyone would advise me to, then. It would be absurd not to do it. Though, all the same, there are always great risks in two people living together, particularly nervous people,—such as we are. But what do you think, Andersen? Suppose some fairy god-mother did give us this money, would you advise us to risk it? Of course, we know, girls like a large house and a lot of servants! She wouldn’t get that with me, because I hate those things, and wouldn’t have them, even if I could afford it. What would you advise, Andersen, if some mad chance did make such a thing possible? Would it be worth the risk?”

  An additional motive, in the queerly constituted mind of the recluse, for making this extraordinary request, was the Pariah-like motive of wishing to propitiate the stone-carver. Parallel with his humorous love of shocking people, ran, through Mr. Quincunx
’s nature, the naive and innocent wish to win them over to his side; and his method of realizing this wish was to put himself completely at their mercy, laying his meanest thoughts bare, and abandoning his will to their will, so that for very shame they could not find it in them to injure him, but were softened, thrown off their guard, and disarmed. Mr. Quincunx knew no restraint in these confessions by the way, in these appeals to the voices and omens of casual encounter. He grew voluble, and even shameless. In quiet reaction afterwards, in the loneliness of his cottage, he was often led to regret with gloomy-remorse the manner in which he had betrayed himself. It was then that he found himself hating, with the long-brooding hatred of a true solitary, the persons to whom he had exposed the recesses of his soul. At the moment of communicativeness, however, he was never able to draw rein or come to a pause. If he grew conscious that he was making a fool of himself, a curious demonic impulse in him only pressed him on to humiliate himself further.

  He derived a queer inverted pleasure from thus offering himself, stripped and naked, to the smiter. It was only afterwards, in the long hours of his loneliness, that the poison of his outraged pride festered and fermented, and a deadly malice possessed him towards the recipients of his confidences. There was something admirable about the manner in which this quaint man made, out of his very lack of resistant power, a sort of sanctity of dependence. But this triumph of weakness in him, this dissolution of the very citadel of his being, in so beautiful and mystical an abandonment to the sympathy of our common humanity, was attended by lamentable issues in its resultant hatred and malice. Had Mr. Quincunx been able to give himself up to this touching candour without these melancholy and misanthropic reactions, his temper would have been very nearly the temper of a saint; but the gall and wormwood of the hours that followed, the corroding energy of the goblin of malice that was born of such unnatural humiliations, put a grievous gulf between him and the heavenly condition.

  It must also be remembered, in qualification of the outrageousness, one might almost say the indecency, of his appeal to Andersen, that he had not in the remotest degree realized the extent of the stone-carver’s infatuation with the Italian. Neither physical passion, nor ideal passion, were things that entered into his view of the relations between the sexes. Desire with him was of a strange and complicated subtlety, generally diffused into a mild and brooding sentiment. He was abnormally faithful, but at the same time abnormally cold; and though, very often, jealousy bit him like a viper, it was a jealousy of the mind, not a jealousy of the senses.