Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  “My lady’s lost her golden ring;

  Her golden ring, her golden ring;

  My lady’s lost her golden ring;

  I pitch upon you to find it!”

  The song’s refrain died away over the waves, and was answered by the scream of an astonished cormorant, and by a mocking shout from a group of idle soldiers on the grassy terrace above the cliff.

  “Shall us throw her ring out to sea?” cried Annie. “They say a ring lost so, means sorrow for her that owns it. Say ‘yes,’ and it’s gone, Luke!”

  While the girl’s arm swung backwards and forwards above him, the stone-carver’s thoughts whirled even more rapidly through his brain. A drastic and bold idea, that had often before crossed the threshold of his consciousness, now assumed a most dominant shape. Why not ask Annie to marry him?

  He was growing a little weary of his bachelor-life, The wayward track of his days had more than once, of late, seemed to have reached a sort of climax. Why not, at one reckless stroke, end this epoch of his history, and launch out upon another? His close association with James had hitherto stood in the way of any such step, but his brother had fallen recently into such fits of gloomy reticence, that he had found himself wondering more than once whether such a drastic troubling of the waters, as the introduction of a girl into their ménage, would not ease the situation a little. It was not for a moment to be supposed that he and James could separate. If Annie did marry him, she must do so on the understanding of his brother’s living with them.

  Luke began to review in his mind the various cottages in Nevilton which might prove available for this adventure. It tickled his fancy a great deal, the thought of having a house and garden of his own, and he was shrewd enough to surmise that of all his feminine friends, Annie was by far the best fitted to perform the functions of the good-tempered companion of a philosophical sentimentalist. The gentle creature had troubled him so little by jealous fits in her rôle of sweetheart, that it did not present itself as probable that she would prove a shrewish wife. Glancing across the blue water to the great Rock-Island opposite them, Luke came rapidly to the conclusion that he would take the risk and make the eventful plunge. He knew enough of himself to have full confidence in his power of dealing with the delicate art of matrimony, and the very difficulties of the situation, implied in the number of his contemporary amours, only added a tang and piquancy to the enterprise.

  “Well,” cried Annie. “Shall us throw the pretty lady’s ring into the deep sea? It’ll mean trouble for her, trouble and tears, Luke! Be ’ee of a mind to do it, or be ’ee not? ’Tis your hand must fling it, and with the flinging of it, her heart ’ll drop, splash—splash—into deep sorrow. She’ll cry her eyes out, for this ’ere job, and that’s the truth of it, Luke darling. Be ’ee ready to fling it, or be ’ee not ready? There’ll be no getting it back, once us have thro wed it in.”

  She held out her arm towards him as she spoke, and with her other hand pushed back her hair from her forehead. For so soft and tender a creature as the girl was, it was strange, the wild Maenad-like look, which she wore at that moment. She might have been an incarnation of the avenging deities of sea and air, threatening disaster to some unwitting Olympian.

  Luke scrambled to his feet, and seizing her wrist with both his hands, forced her fingers apart, and possessed himself of the equivocal trinket.

  “If I throw it,” he cried, in an excited tone, “will you be my wife, Annie?”

  At this unexpected word a complete collapse overtook the girl. All trace of colour left her cheeks and a sudden trembling passed through her limbs. She staggered, and would have fallen, if Luke had not seized her in his arms.

  In the shock of saving her, the stone-carver’s hand involuntarily unclosed, and the piece of gold, slipping from his fingers, fell down upon the slope of the rock, and sliding over its edge, sank into the deep water.

  “Annie! Annie! What is it, dear?” murmured Luke, making the trembling girl sit down by his side, and supporting her tenderly.

  For her only answer she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him passionately again and again. It was not only of kisses that Luke became conscious, for, as she pressed him to her, her breast heaved pitifully under her print frock, and when she let him go, the taste of her tears was in his mouth. For the first time in his life the queer wish entered the stonecarver’s mind that he had not, in his day, made love quite so often.

  There was something so pure, so confiding, and yet so passionately tender, about little Annie’s abandonment, that it produced, in the epicurean youth’s soul, a most quaint sense of shame and embarrassment. It was deliciously sweet to him, all the same, to find how, beyond expectation, he had made so shrewd a choice. But he wished some humorous demon at the back of his mind wouldn’t call up before him at that moment the memory of other clinging arms and lips.

  With an inward grin of sardonic commentary upon his melting mood, the cynical thought passed through his mind, how strange it was, in this mortal world, that human kisses should all so lamentably resemble one another, and that human tears should all leave behind them the same salt taste! Life was indeed a matter of “eternal recurrence,” and whether with Portland and its war-ships as the background, or with Nevilton Mount and its shady woods, the same emotions and the same reactions must needs come and go, with the same inexorable monotony!

  He glanced down furtively into the foam-flecked water, but there was no sign of the lost ring. The tide seemed to have turned now, and the sea appeared less calm. Little flukes of white spray surged up intermittently on the in-rolling waves, and a strong breath of wind, rising with the sinking of the sun, blew cool and fresh upon their foreheads.

  “Her ring’s gone,” whispered Annie, pulling down her sleeves over her soft arms, and holding out her wrists, for him to fasten the bands, “and you do belong to none but I now, Luke. When shall us be married, dear?” she added, pressing her cool cheek against his, and running her fingers through his hair.

  The words, as well as the gesture that accompanied them, jarred upon Luke’s susceptibilities.

  “Why is it,” he thought, “that girls are so extraordinarily stupid in these things? Why do they always seem only waiting for an opportunity to drop their piquancy and provocation, and become confident, assured, possessive, complacent? Have I,” he said to himself, “made a horrible blunder? Shall I regret this day forever, and be ready to give anything for those fatal words not to have been uttered?”

  He glanced down once more upon the brimming, in-rushing tide that covered Gladys’ ring. Then with a jerk he pulled out his watch.

  “Go and call the others,” he commanded, “I’m going to have a dip before we start.”

  Annie glanced quickly into his face, but reassured by his friendly smile, proceeded to obey him, with only the least little sigh.

  “Don’t drown yourself, dear,” she called back to him, as she made her way cautiously across the rocks.

  Luke hurriedly undressed, and standing for a moment, a slim golden figure, in the horizontal sunlight, swung himself lightly down over the rock’s edge and struck out boldly for the open sea.

  With vigorous strokes he wrestled with the inflowing tide. Wave after wave splashed against his face. Pieces of floating sea-weed and wisps of surf clung to his arms and hair. But he held resolutely on, breathing deep breaths of liberty and exultation, and drinking in, as if from a vast wide-brimmed cup, the thrilling spaciousness of air and sky.

  Girls, love-making, marriage,—the whole complication of the cloying erotic world,—fell away from him, like the too-soft petals of some great stifling velvet-bosomed flower; and naked of desire, as he was naked of human clothes, he gave himself up to the free, pure elements. In later hours, when once more the old reiterated tune was beating time in his brain, he recalled with regret the large emancipation of that moment.

  As he splashed and spluttered, and turned over deliciously in the water, like some exultant human-limbed merman, returning, after a l
ong inland exile, to his natural home, he found his thoughts fantastically reverting to those queer, mad ideas, about the evil power of the stone they both worked upon, to which James Andersen had given expression when his wits were astray. Here at any rate, in the solid earth’s eternal antagonist, was a power capable of destroying every sinister spell.

  He remorsefully blamed himself that he had not compelled his brother to come down with them to the sea. He recalled the half-hearted invitation he had extended to James, not altogether sorry to have it refused, and not repeating it. He had been a selfish fool, he thought. Were James swimming now by his side, his pleasure in that violet-coloured coast-line and that titanic rock-monster, would have been doubled by the revival of indescribably appealing memories.

  He made a vigorous resolution that never again—whatever mood his brother might be in—would he allow the perilous lure of exquisite femininity, to come between him and the nobler classic bond, of the love that “passeth the love of women.”

  Conscious that he must return without a moment’s further delay if they were to catch their train, he swung round in the water and let the full tide bear him shoreward.

  On the way back he was momentarily assailed by a slight touch of cramp in his legs. It quickly passed, but it was enough to give the life-enamoured youth a shock of cold panic. Death? That, after all, he thought, was the only intolerable thing. As long as one breathed and moved, in this mad world, nothing that could happen greatly mattered! One was conscious,—one could note the acts and scenes of the incredible drama; and in this mere fact of consciousness, one could endure anything. But to be dead,—to be deprived of the sweet air,—that remained, that must always remain, the one absolute Terror!

  Reaching his starting-place, Luke was amused to observe that the tide was already splashing over their rock, and in another minute or two would have drenched his clothes. He chuckled to himself as he noted how this very practical possibility jerked his mind into a completely different vein. Love, philosophy, friendship, all tend to recede to the very depths of one’s invaluable consciousness, when there appears a risk of returning to a railway station in a drenched shirt.

  He collected his possessions with extreme rapidity, and holding them in a bundle at arm’s length from his dripping body, clambered hastily up the shore, and humorously waving back his modest companions, who were now being chaffed by quite a considerable group of soldiers on the cliff above, he settled himself down on a bank of sea-weed and began hurriedly to dry, using his waistcoat as a towel.

  He was soon completely dressed, and, all four of them a little agitated, began a hasty rush for the train.

  Phyllis and Polly scolded him all the way without mercy. Had he brought them out here, to keep them in the place all night? What would their mothers say, and their fathers, and their brothers, and their aunts?

  Annie, alone of the party, remained silent, her full rich lips closed like a sleepy peony, and her heavy-lidded velvety eyes casting little timid affectionate glances at her so unexpectedly committed lover.

  The crossness of the two younger girls grew in intensity when, the ferry safely crossed, Luke dragged them at remorseless speed through the crowded town. Pitiful longing eyes were cast back at the glittering shops and the magical picture-shows. Why had he taken them to those horrid rocks? Why hadn’t he given them time to look at the shop-windows? They’d promised faithfully to bring back something for Dad and Betty and Queenie and Dick.

  Phyllis had ostentatiously flung into the harbour her elaborately selected bunch of sea-flora, and the poor ill-used plants, hot from the girl’s hand, were now tossing up and down amid the tarry keels and swaying hawsers. The girl regretted this action now,—regretted it more and more vividly as the station drew near. Mummy always loved a bunch o’ flowers, and they were so pretty! She was sure it was Luke who had made her lose them. He had pushed her so roughly up those nasty steps.

  Tears were in Polly’s eyes as, bedraggled and panting, they emerged on the open square where the gentle monarch looks down from his stone horse. There were sailors now, mixed with the crowd on the esplanade,—such handsome boys! It was cruel, it was wicked, that they had to go, just when the real sport began.

  The wretched Jubilee Clock—how they all hated its trim appearance!—had a merciless finger pointing at the very minute their train was due to start, as Luke hurried them round the street-corner. Polly fairly began to cry, as they dragged her from the alluring scene. She was certain that the Funny Men were just going to begin. She was sure that that distant drum meant Punch and Judy!

  Breathlessly they rushed upon the platform. Wildly, with anxious eyes and gasping tones, they enquired of the first official they encountered, whether the Yeoborough train had gone.

  Observing the beauty of the three troubled girls, this placid authority proceeded to tantalize them, asking “what the hurry was,” and whether they wanted a “special,” and other maddening questions. It was only when Luke, who had rushed furiously to the platform’s remote end, was observed to be cheerfully and serenely returning, that Phyllis recovered herself sufficiently to give their disconcerted insulter what she afterwards referred to as “a bit of lip in return for his blarsted sauce.”

  No,—the train would not be starting for another ten minutes. Fortunate indeed was this accident of a chance delay on the Great Western Railroad,—the most punctual of all railroads in the world,—for it landed Luke with three happy, completely recovered damsels, and in a compartment all to themselves, when the train did move at last. Abundantly fortified with ginger-pop and sponge-cake,—how closely Luke associated the savour of both these refreshments with such an excursion as this!—and further cheered by the secure possession of chocolates, bananas, “Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday,” and the “Illustrated London News,”—the girls romped, and sang, and teased each other and Luke, and whispered endearing mockeries out of the window to sedately unconscious gentlemen, at every station where they stopped until the aged guard’s paternal benevolence changed to irritable crossness, and Luke himself was not altogether sorry when the familiar landscape of Yeoborough, dusky and shadowy in the twilight, hove in sight.

  Little Polly left them at the second of the two Yeoborough stations, and the others, crowding at the window to wave their goodbyes, were carried on in the same train to Nevilton.

  During this final five minutes, Annie slipped softly down upon her lover’s knees and seemed to wish to indicate to Phyllis, without the use of words, that her relations with their common friend were now on a new plane,—at once more innocent and less reserved.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  AVE ATQUE VALE!

  JAMES ANDERSEN lay dead in the brothers’ little bedroom at the station-master’s cottage. It could not be maintained that his face wore the unruffled calm conventionally attributed to mortality’s last repose. On the other hand, his expression was not that of one who has gone down in hopeless despair.

  What his look really conveyed to his grief-worn brother, as he hung over him all that August night, was the feeling that he had been struck in mid-contest, with equal chance of victory or defeat, and with the indelible imprint upon his visage of the stress and strain of the terrific struggle.

  It was a long and strange vigil that Luke found himself thus bound to keep, when the first paroxysm of his grief had subsided and his sympathetic landlady had left him alone with his dead.

  He laughed aloud,—a merciless little laugh,—at one point in the night, to note how even this blow, rending as it did the very ground beneath his feet, had yet left quite untouched and untamed his irresistible instinct towards self-analysis. Not a single one of the innumerable, and in many cases astounding, thoughts that passed through his mind, but he watched it, and isolated it, and played with it,—just in the old way.

  Luke was not by any means struck dumb or paralyzed by this event. His intelligence had never been more acute, or his senses more responsive, than they remained through those long hours of watching.

&nbs
p; It is true he could neither eat nor sleep. The influence of the motionless figure beside him seemed to lie in a vivid and abnormal stimulation of all his intellectual faculties.

  Not a sound arose from the sleeping house, from the darkened fields, from the distant village, but he noted it and made a mental record of its cause. He kept two candles alight at his brother’s head, three times refilling the candlesticks, as though the guttering and hissing of the dwindling flames would tease and disturb the dead.

  He had been careful to push the two windows of the room wide open; but the night was so still that not a breath of wind entered to make the candles flicker, or to lift the edge of the white sheet stretched beneath his brother’s bandaged chin. This horrible bandage,—one of the little incidents that Luke marked as unexpectedly ghastly,—seemed to slip its knot at a certain moment, causing the dead man’s mouth to fall open, in a manner that made the watcher shudder, so suggestive did it seem of one about to utter a cry for help.

  Luke noted, as another factor in the phenomena of death, the peculiar nature of the coldness of his brother’s skin, as he bent down once and again to touch his forehead. It was different from the coldness of water or ice or marble. It was a clammy coldness; the coldness of a substance that was neither—in the words of the children’s game—“animal, vegetable, nor mineral.”

  Luke remembered the story of that play of Webster’s, in which the unhappy heroine, in the blank darkness of her dungeon, is presented with a dead hand to caress. The abominably wicked wish crossed his mind once, as he unclosed those stark fingers, that he could cause the gentle Lacrima, whom he regarded,—not altogether fairly,—as responsible for his brother’s death, to feel the touch of such a hand.