Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  He made as if he would return with her to the town, but she laid her hand on his arm.

  “No—no! let’s walk on quietly here. I can talk to you better here.”

  The roadway, however, proved so disconcerting, owing to great gusts of wind which kept driving the sand and dust along its surface, that before Vennie had summoned up courage to begin her story, they found it necessary to debouch to their left and enter the marshy flats of Lodmoor. They took their way along the edge of a broad ditch, whose black peat-bottomed waters were overhung by clumps of “Michaelmas daisies” and sprinkled with weird glaucous-leafed plants. It was a place of a singular character, owing to the close encounter in it of land and sea, and it seemed to draw the appeal of its strange desolation almost equally from both these sources.

  Vennie, on the verge of speaking, found her senses in a state of morbid alertness. Everything she felt and saw at that moment lodged itself with poignant sharpness in her brain and returned to her mind long afterwards. So extreme was her nervous tension that she found it difficult to disentangle her thoughts from all these outward impressions.

  The splash of a water-rat became an episode in her suspended revelation. The bubbles rising from the movements of an eel in the mud got mixed with the image of Mrs. Wotnot picking laurel-leaves. The flight of a sea-gull above their heads was a projection of Dangelis’ escape from the spells of his false mistress. The wind shaking the reeds was the breath of her fatal news ruffling the man’s smiling attention. The wail of the startled plovers was the cry of her own heart, calling upon all the spirits of truth and justice, to make him believe her words.

  She told him at last,—told him everything, walking slowly by his side with her eyes cast down and her hands clasped tight behind her.

  When she had finished, there was an immense intolerable silence, and slowly, very slowly, she permitted her glance to rise to her companion’s face, to grasp the effect of her narration upon him.

  How rare it is that these world-shaking revelations produce the impression one has anticipated! To Vennie’s complete amazement,—and even, it must be allowed, a little to her dismay,—Dangelis regarded her with a frank untroubled smile.

  “You,—I—” she stammered, and stopped abruptly. Then, before he could answer her, “I didn’t know you knew all this. Did you really know it,—and not mind? Don’t people mind these things in—in other countries?”

  Dangelis spoke at last. “Oh, yes of course, we mind as much as any of you; that is to say, if we do mind,—but you must remember, Miss Seldom, there are circumstances, situations,—there are, in fact feelings,—which make these things sometimes rather a relief than otherwise!”

  He threw up his stick in the air, as he spoke, and caught it as it descended.

  “Pardon me, one moment, I want—I want to see if I can jump this ditch.”

  He threw both stick and hat on the ground, and to Vennie’s complete amazement, stepped back a pace or two, and running desperately to the brink of the stream cleared it with a bound. He repeated this manœuvre from the further bank, and returned, breathing hard and fast, to the girl’s side.

  Picking up his hat and stick, he uttered a wild series of barbaric howls, such howls as Vennie had never, in her life, heard issuing from the mouth of man or beast. Had Gladys’ treachery turned his brain?

  But no madman could possibly have smiled the friendly boyish smile with which he greeted her when this performance was over.

  “So sorry if I scared you,” he said. “Do you know what that is? It’s our college ‘yell.’ It’s what we do at base-ball games.”

  Vennie thought he was going to do it again, and in her apprehension she laid a hand on his sleeve.

  “But don’t you really mind Miss Romer’s being like this? Did you know she was like this?’ she enquired.

  “Don’t let’s think about her any more,” cried the artist. “I don’t care what she’s like, now I can get rid of her. To tell you the honest truth, Miss Seldom, I’d come down here for no other reason than to think over this curst hole I’ve got myself into, and to devise some way out.

  “What you tell me,—and I believe every word of it, I want to believe every word of it!—just gives me the excuse I need. Good-bye, Miss Gladys! Good-bye, Ariadne!’ Ban-ban, Ca-Caliban, Have a new master, get a new man!’ No more engagements for me, dear Miss Seldom! I’m a free lance now, a free lance,—henceforward and forever!”

  The exultant artist was on the point of indulging once more in his college yell, but the scared and bewildered expression on Vennie’s face saved her from a second experience of that phenomenon.

  “Shall I tell you what I was thinking of doing, as I strolled along the Front this afternoon?”

  Vennie nodded, unable to repress a smile as she remembered the difficulty she had in arresting this stroll.

  “I was thinking of taking the boat for the Channel Islands tomorrow! I even went so far as to make enquiries about the time it started. What do you think of that?”

  Vennie thought it was extremely singular, and she also thought that she had never heard the word “enquiries” pronounced in just that way.

  “It leaves quite early, at nine in the morning. And it’s some boat,—I can tell you that!”

  “Well,” continued Vennie, recovering by degrees that sense of concentrated power which had accompanied her all day, “what now? Are you still going to sail by it?”

  “That’s—a—large—proposition,” answered her interlocutor slowly. “I—I rather think I am!”

  One effect of his escape from his Nevilton enchantress seemed to be an irrepressible tendency to relapse into the American vernacular.

  They continued advancing along the edge of the ditch, side by side.

  Vennie plunged into the matter of Lacrima and Mr. Quincunx.

  She narrated all she knew of this squalid and sinister story. She enlarged upon the two friends’ long devotion to one another. She pictured the wickedness and shame of the projected marriage with John Goring. Finally she explained how it had come about that both Mr. Romer’s slaves, and with them the little circus-waif, were at that moment in Weymouth.

  “And so you’ve carried them off?” cried the Artist in high glee. “Bless my soul, but I admire you for it! And what are you going to do with them now?”

  Vennie looked straight into his eyes. “That is where I want your help, Mr. Dangelis!”

  It was late in the evening before the citizen of Toledo, Ohio, and the would-be Postulant of the Sacred Heart parted from one another opposite the Jubilee Clock.

  A reassuring telegram had been sent to Mrs. Seldom announcing Vennie’s return in the course of the following day.

  As for the rest, all had been satisfactorily arranged. The American had displayed overpowering generosity. He seemed anxious to do penance for his obsession by the daughter, by lavishing benefactions upon the victims of the father. Perhaps it seemed to him that this was the best manner of paying back the debt, which his aesthetic imagination owed to the suggestive charms of the Nevilton landscape.

  He made himself, in a word, completely responsible for the three wanderers. He would carry them off with him to the Channel Isles, and either settle them down there, or make it possible for them to cross thence to France, and from France, if so they pleased, on to Lacrima’s home in Italy. He would come to an arrangement with his bankers to have handed over definitely to Mr. Quincunx a sum that would once and for all put him into a position of financial security.

  “I’d have paid a hundred times as much as that,” he laughingly assured Vennie, “to have got clear of my mix-up with that girl.”

  Thus it came about that at nine o’clock on the day which followed the burial of James Andersen, Vennie, standing on the edge of the narrow wharf, between railway-trucks and hawsers, watched the ship with the red funnels carry off the persons who—under Heaven—were the chief cause of the stone-carver’s death.

  As the four figures, waving to her over the ship’s side
grew less and less distinct, Vennie felt an extraordinary and unaccountable desire to burst into a fit of passionate weeping. She could not have told why she wept, nor could she have told whether her tears were tears of relief or of desolation, but something in the passing of that brightly-painted ship round the corner of the little break-water, gave her a different emotion from any she had ever known in her life.

  When at last she turned her back to the harbour, she asked the way to the nearest Catholic Church, but in place of following the directions given her, she found herself seated on the shingles below Brunswick Terrace, watching the in-drawing and out-flowing waves.

  How strange this human existence was! Long after the last block of Leonian stone had been removed from its place—long after the stately pinnacles of Nevilton House had crumbled into shapeless ruins,—long after the memory of all these people’s troubles had been erased and forgotten,—this same tide would fling itself upon this same beach, and its voice then would be as its voice now, restless, unsatisfied, unappeased.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  THE GOAT AND BOY

  IT was the middle of October. Francis Taxater and Luke Andersen sat opposite one another over a beer-stained table in the parlour of the Goat and Boy. The afternoon was drawing to its close and the fire in the little grate threw a warm ruddy light through the darkening room.

  Outside the rain was falling, heavily, persistently,—the sort of rain that by long-continued importunity finds its way through every sort of obstacle. For nearly a month this rain had lasted. It had come in with the equinox, and Heaven knew how long it was going to stay. It had so thoroughly drenched all the fields, woods, lanes, gardens and orchards of Nevilton, that a palpable atmosphere of charnel-house chilliness pervaded everything. Into this atmosphere the light sank at night like a thing drowned in deep water, and into this atmosphere the light rose at dawn like something rising from beneath the sea.

  The sun itself, as a definite presence, had entirely disappeared. It might have fallen into fathomless space, for all the visible signs it gave of its existence. The daylight seemed a pallid entity, diffused through the lower regions of the air, unconnected with any visible fount of life or warmth.

  The rain seemed to draw forth from the earth all the accumulated moisture of centuries of damp autumns, while between the water below the firmament and the water above the firmament,—between the persistent deluge from the sky and the dampness exuded from the earth,—the death-stricken multitudinous leaves of Nevilton drifted to their morgue in the cart-ruts and ditches.

  The only object in the vicinity whose appearance seemed to suffer no change from this incursion of many waters was Leo’s Hill. Leo’s Hill looked as if it loved the rain, and the rain looked as if it loved Leo’s Hill. In no kind of manner were its familiar outlines affected, except perhaps in winning a certain added weight, by reason of the fact that its rival Mount had been stripped of its luxuriant foliage.

  “So our dear Mr. Romer has got his Freight Bill through,” said Luke, sipping his glass of whiskey and smiling at Mr. Taxater. “He at any rate then won’t be worried by this rain.”

  “I’m to dine with him tomorrow,” answered the papal champion, “so I shall have an opportunity of discovering what he’s actually gained by this.”

  “I wish I’d had James cremated,” muttered Luke, staring at the fire-place, into which the rain fell down the narrow chimney.

  Mr. Taxater crossed himself.

  “What do you really feel,” enquired the younger man abruptly, “about the chances in favour of a life after death?”

  “The Church,” answered Mr. Taxater, stirring his rum and sugar with a spoon, “could hardly be expected to formulate a dogma denying such a hope. The true spirit of her attitude towards it may perhaps be best understood in the repetition of her requiem prayer, ‘Save us from eternal death!’ We none of us want eternal death, my friend, though many of us are very weary of this particular life. I do not know that I am myself, however. But that may be due to the fact that I am a real sceptic. To love life, Andersen, one cannot be too sceptical.”

  “Upon my soul I believe you!” answered the stone-carver, “but I cannot quite see how you can make claim to that title.”

  “You’re not a philosopher my friend,” said Mr. Taxater, leaning his elbows on the table and fixing a dark but luminous eye upon his interlocutor.

  “If you were a philosopher you would know that to be a true sceptic it is necessary to be a Catholic. You, for instance, aren’t a sceptic, and never can be. You’re a dogmatic materialist. You doubt everything in the world except doubt. I doubt doubt.”

  Luke rose and poked the fire.

  “I’m afraid my little Annie’ll be frightfully wet,” he remarked, “when she gets home tonight. I wish that last train from Yeoborough wasn’t quite so late.”

  “Do you propose to go down to the station to meet her?” enquired Mr. Taxater.

  Luke sighed. “I suppose so,” he said. “That’s the worst of being married. There’s always something or other interfering with the main purpose of life.”

  “May I ask what the main purpose of life may be?” said the theologian.

  “Talking with you, of course,” replied the young man smiling; “talking with any friend. Oh damn! I can’t tell you how I miss going up to Dead Man’s Cottage.”

  “Yes,” said the great scholar meditatively, “women are bewitching creatures, especially when they’re very young or very old, but they aren’t exactly arresting in conversation.”

  Luke became silent, meditating on this.

  “They throw out little things now and then,” he said. “Annie does. But they’ve no sense of proportion. If they’re happy they’re thrilled by everything, and if they’re unhappy,—well, you know how it is! They don’t bite at the truth, for the sake of biting, and they never get to the bone. They just lick the gloss of things with the tips of their tongues. And they quiver and vibrate so, you never know where they are, or what they’ve got up their sleeve that tickles them.”

  Mr. Taxater lifted his glass to his mouth and carefully replaced it on the table. There was something in this movement of his plump white fingers which always fascinated Luke. Mr. Taxater’s hands looked as though, beyond the pen and the wine-cup, they never touched any earthly object.

  “Have you heard any more of Philip Wone?” enquired the stone-carver.

  The theologian shook his head. “I’m afraid, since he went up to London, he’s really got entangled in these anarchist plots.”

  “I’m not unselfish enough to be an anarchist,” said Luke, “but I sympathize with their spirit. The sort of people I can’t stand are these Christian Socialists. What really pleases me, I suppose, is the notion of a genuine aristocracy, an aristocracy as revolutionary as anarchists in their attitude to morals and such things, an aristocracy that’s flung up out of this mad world, as a sort of exquisite flower of chance and accident, an aristocracy that is worth all this damned confusion!”

  Mr. Taxater smiled. It always amused him when Luke Andersen got excited in this way, and began catching his breath and gesticulating. He seemed to have heard these remarks on other occasions. He regarded them as a signal that the stone-carver had drunk more whiskey than was good for him. When completely himself Luke talked of girls and of death. When a little depressed he abused either Nonconformists or Socialists. When in the early stages of intoxication he eulogized the upper classes.

  “It’s a pity,” said the theologian, “that Ninsy couldn’t bring herself to marry that boy. There’s something morbid in the way she talks. I met her in Nevil’s Gully yesterday, and I had quite a long conversation with her.”

  Luke looked sharply at him. “Have you yourself ever seen her, across there?” he asked making a gesture in the direction of the churchyard.

  Mr. Taxater shook his head. “Have you?” he demanded.

  Luke nodded.

  A sudden silence fell upon them. The rain beat in redoubled fury upon the window, and
they could hear it pattering on the roof and falling in a heavy stream from the pipe above the eaves.

  The younger man felt as though some tragic intimation, uttered in a tongue completely beyond the reach of both of them, were beating about for entry, at closed shutters.

  Mr. Taxater felt no sensation of this kind. “Non est reluctandum cum Deo” were the sage words with which he raise his glass to his lips.

  Luke remained motionless staring at the window, and thinking of a certain shrouded figure, with hollow cheeks and crossed hands, to whom this rain was nothing, and less than nothing.

  Once more there was silence between them, as though a flock of noiseless night-birds were flying over the house, on their way to the far-off sea.

  “How is Mrs. Seldom getting on?” enquired Luke, pushing back his chair. “Is Vennie allowed to write to her from that place?”

  The theologian smiled. “Oh, the dear lady is perfectly happy! In fact, I think she’s really happier than when she was worrying herself about Vennie’s future.”

  “I don’t like these convents,” remarked Luke.

  “Few people like them,” said the papal champion, “who have never entered them.

  “I’ve never seen an unhappy nun. They are almost too happy. They are like children. Perhaps they’re the only persons in existence who know what continual, as opposed to spasmodic, happiness means. The happiness of sanctity is a secret that has to be concealed from the world, just as the happiness of certain very vicious people has,—for fear there should be no more marriages.”

  “Talking of marriages,” remarked Luke, “I’d give anything to know how our friend Gladys is getting on with Clavering. I expect his attitude of heroic pity has worn a little thin by this time. I wonder how soon the more earthly side of the shield will wear thin too! But—poor dear girl!—I do feel sorry for her. Fancy having to listen to the Reverend Hugh’s conversation by night and by day!