Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  His lips trembled with anger and his hand shook, as he recalled the interview of the preceding night. The wife had annoyed him almost more than the husband. His brutality had been gross and frank. The lascivious joy of a strong nature, in deliberately outraging a weaker one, had gleamed forth from his jeering eyes.

  But there had been an unction, an hypocritical sentimentality, about Mrs. Romer’s tone, that had made him hate her the more bitterly of the two. The fact that she also—stupid lump of fawning obesity as she was!—was a victim of this imperial tyrant, did not in the least assuage him. The helot who is under the lash hates the helot who crouches by the master’s chair, more deeply than he hates the master. It is because of this unhappy law of nature that there are so few successful revolts among our social Pariahs. The well-constituted ruler of men divides his serfs into those who hold the whip and those who are whipped. Yes, he hated her the most. But how he hated them both!

  The heart of your true Pariah is a strange and dark place, concealing depths of rancorous animosity, which those who over-ride and discount such feelings rarely calculate upon. It is a mistake to assume that this curious role—the role of being a Pariah upon our planet—is one confined to the submerged, the outcast, the criminal.

  There are Pariahs in every village. It might be said that there are Pariahs in every family. The Pariah is one who is born with an innate inability to deal vigorously and effectively with his fellow animals. One sees these unfortunates every day—on the street, in the office, at the domestic hearth. One knows them by the queer look in their eyes; the look of animals who have been crushed rather than tamed.

  It is not only that they are weaker than the rest and less effectual. They are different. It is in their difference that the tragedy of their fate lies. Commonplace weaklings, who are not born Pariahs, have in their hearts the same standards, the same ambitions, the same prejudices, as those who rule the world. Such weaklings venerate, admire, and even love the strong unscrupulous hands, the crafty unscrupulous brains, who push them to and fro like pawns.

  But the Pariah does not venerate the Power that oppresses him. He despises it and hates it. Long-accumulated loathing rankles in his heart. He is crushed but not won. He is penned, like a shorn sheep; but his thoughts “wander through Eternity.”

  And it is this difference, separating him from the rest, that excites such fury in those who oppress him. The healthy-minded prosperous man is irritated beyond endurance by this stranger within the gate—this incorrigible, ineffectual critic, cumbering his road. The mob, too, always ready, like spiteful, cawing rooks, to fall upon a wounded comrade, howl remorselessly for his destruction. The Pariah is seldom able to retain the sweetness of his natural affections.

  Buffetted by the unconscious brutality of those about him, he retorts with conscious and unfathomable hatred. His soul festers and gangrenes within him, and the loneliness of his place among his fellows leads him to turn upon them all—like a rat in a gin. The pure-minded capable man, perceiving the rancorous misanthropy of this sick spirit, longs to trample him into the mud, to obliterate him, to forget him. But the man whose strength and cunning is associated with lascivious perversity, wishes to have him by his side, to humiliate, to degrade, to outrage. A taste to be surrounded by Pariahs is an interesting peculiarity of a certain successful class. Such companionship is to them a perpetual and pleasing reminder of their own power.

  Mr. Quincunx was a true Pariah in his miserable combination of inability to strike back at the people who injured him, and inability to forget their injuries. He propitiated their tastes, bent to their will, conciliated their pride, agreed with their opinions, and hated them with demoniacal hatred.

  As he pulled up his weeds in the hot sun, this particular morning, Maurice Quincunx fantastically consoled himself by imagining all manner of disasters to his enemies. Every time he touched with his hands the soft-crumbling earth, he uttered a kind of half-conscious prayer that, in precisely such a way, the foundations of Nevilton House should crumble and yield. Under his hat—for he was hypochondriacally apprehensive about sunstrokes—flapped and waved in the wind a large cabbage leaf, placed carefully at the back of his head to protect his neck as he bent down. The shadow of this cabbage leaf, as it was thrown across the dusty path, assumed singular and sinister shapes, giving the impression sometimes that the head of Mr. Quincunx was gnome-like or goblin-like in its proportions.

  Perhaps the most unfortunate characteristic of Pariahs is that though they cling instinctively to one another they are irritated and provoked by each other’s peculiarities.

  This unhappy tendency was now to receive sad confirmation in our weed-puller’s case, for he was suddenly interrupted by the appearance at his gate of Lacrima Traffio.

  He rose to meet her, and without inviting her to pass the entrance, for he was extremely nervous of village gossip, and one never knew what a casual passer-by might think, he leant over the low wall and talked with her from that security.

  She seemed in a very depressed and pitiable mood and the large dark eyes that fixed themselves upon her friend’s face were full of an inarticulate appeal.

  “I cannot endure it much longer,” she said. “It gets worse and worse every day.”

  Maurice Quincunx knew perfectly well what she meant, but the curious irritation to which I have just referred drove him to rejoin:

  “What gets worse?”

  “Their unkindness,” answered the girl with a quick reproachful look, “their perpetual unkindness.”

  “But they feed you well, don’t they?” said the hermit, removing his hat and rearranging the cabbage-leaf so as to adapt it to the new angle of the sun. “And they don’t beat you. You haven’t to scrub floors or mend clothes. People, like you and I, must be thankful for being allowed to eat and sleep at all on this badly-arranged earth.”

  “I keep thinking of Italy,” murmured Lacrima. “I think it is your English ways that trouble me. I don’t believe—I can’t believe—they always mean to be unkind. But English people are so heartless!”

  “You seemed to like that Andersen fellow well enough,” grumbled Mr. Quincunx.

  “How can you be so silly, Maurice?” cried the girl, slipping through the gate in spite of its owner’s furtive glances down the road. “How can you be so silly?”

  She moved past him, up the path, and seated herself upon the edge of the wheel-barrow.

  “You can go on with your weeding,” she said, “I can talk to you while you work.”

  “Of course,” murmured Mr. Quincunx, making no effort to resume his labour, “you naturally find a handsome fellow like that, a more pleasant companion than me. I don’t blame you. I understand it very well.”

  Lacrima impatiently took up a handful of groundsel and spurge from the dusty heap by her side and flung them into the path.

  “You make me quite angry with you, Maurice,” she cried. “How can you say such things after all that has happened between us?”

  “That’s the way,” jeered the man bitterly, plucking at his beard. “That’s the way! Go on abusing me because you are not living at your full pleasure, like a stall-fed upper-class lady!”

  “I shan’t stay with you another moment,” cried Lacrima, with tears in her eyes, “if you are so unkind.”

  As soon as he had reduced her to this point, Mr. Quincunx instantaneously became gentle and tender. This is one of the profoundest laws of a Pariah’s being. He resents it when his companion in helplessness shows a spirit beyond his own, but directly such a one has been driven into reciprocal wretchedness, his own equanimity is automatically regained.

  After only the briefest glance at the gate, he put his arms round the girl and kissed her affectionately. She returned his embrace with interest, disarranging as she did so the cabbage-leaf in his hat, and causing it to flutter down upon the path. They leant together for a while in silence, against the edge of the wheel-barrow, their hands joined.

  Thus associated they would have appeared, to the
dreaded passer-by, in the light of a pair of extremely sentimental lovers, whose passion had passed into the stage of delicious melancholia. The wind whirled the dust in little eddies around them and the sun beat down upon their heads.

  “You must be kind to me when I come to tell you how unhappy I am,” said the Italian. “You are the only real friend I have in the world.”

  It is sad to have to relate that these tender words brought a certain thrill of alarm into the heart of Mr. Quincunx. He felt a sudden apprehension lest she might indicate that it was his duty to run away with her, and face the world in remote regions.

  No one but a born Pariah could have endured the confiding clasp of that little hand and the memory of so ardent a kiss without being roused to an impetuosity of passion ready to dare anything to make her its own.

  Instead of pursuing any further the question of his friend’s troubles, Mr. Quincunx brought the conversation round to his own.

  “The worst that could happen to me has happened,” he said, and he told her of his interview with the Romers the day before. The girl flushed with anger.

  “But this is abominable!” she cried, “simply abominable! You’d better go at once and talk it over with Mrs. Seldom. Surely, surely, something can be done! It is clear they have robbed you of your money. It is a disgraceful thing! Santa Maria—what a country this is!”

  “It is no use,” sighed the man helplessly. “Mrs. Seldom can’t help me. She is poor enough herself. And she will know as well as I do that in the matter of law I am entirely in their hands. My aunt had absolute confidence in Mr. Romer and no confidence in me. No doubt she arranged it with them that they were to dole me out the money like a charity. Mr. Romer did once talk about my lending it to him, and his paying interest on it, and so forth; but he managed all my aunt’s affairs, and I don’t know what arrangement he made with her. My aunt never liked me really. I think if she were alive now she would probably support them in what they are doing. She would certainly say,—she always used to say—that it would do me good to do a little honest work.” He pronounced the words “honest work” with concentrated bitterness.

  “Probably,” he went on, “Mrs. Seldom would say the same. I know I should be extremely unwilling to try and make her see how horrible to me the idea of work of this kind is. She would never understand. She would think it was only that I wanted to remain a “gentleman” and not to lose caste. She would probably tell me that a great many gentlemen have worked in offices before now. I daresay they have, and I hope they enjoyed it! I know what these gentlemen-workers are, and how easy things are made for them. They won’t be made easy for me. I can tell you that, Lacrima!”

  The girl drew a deep sigh, and walked slowly a few paces down the path, meditating, with her hands behind her. Presently she turned.

  “Perhaps after all,” she said, “it won’t be as bad as you fancy. I know the head-clerk in Mr. Romer’s Yeoborough office and he is quite a nice man—altogether different from that Lickwit.”

  Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard with a trembling hand. “Of course I knew you’d say that, Lacrima. You are just like the rest. You women all think, at the bottom of your hearts, that men are no good if they can’t make money. I believe you have an idea that I ought to do what people call ‘get on a bit in the world.’ If you think that, it only shows how little you understand me. I have no intention of ‘getting on.’ I won’t ‘get on’! I would sooner walk into Auber Lake and end the whole business!”

  The suddenness and injustice of this attack really did rouse the Italian to anger. “Good-bye,” she said with a dark flash in her eyes. “I see its no use talking to you when you are in this mood. You have never, never spoken to me in that tone before. Good-bye! I can open the gate for myself, thank you.”

  She walked away from him and passed out into the lane. He stood watching her with a queer haggard look on his face, his sorrowful grey eyes staring in front of him, as if in the presence of an apparition. Then, very slowly, he resumed his work, leaving however the fallen cabbage-leaf unnoticed on the ground.

  The weeds in the wheel-barrow, the straight banked-up lines of potatoes and lettuces, wore, as he returned to them, that curious air of forlorn desertion which is one of nature’s bitterest commentaries upon the folly of such scenes.

  A sickening sense of emptiness took possession of him, and in a moment or two became unendurable. He flung a handful of weeds to the ground and ran impetuously to the gate and out into the lane. It was too late. A group of farm-labourers laughing and shouting, and driving before them a herd of black pigs, blocked up the road. He could not bring himself to pass them, thus hatless and in his shirt-sleeves. Besides, they must have seen the girl, and they would know he was pursuing her.

  He returned slowly up the path to his house, and—to avoid being seen by the men—entered his kitchen, and sat gloomily down upon a chair. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked with contemptuous unconcern. The room had that smell of mortuary dust which rooms in small houses often acquire in the summer. He sat down once more on a chair, his hands upon his knees, and stared vacantly in front of him. A thrush outside the window was cracking a snail upon a stone. When the shouts of the men died away, this was the only sound that came to him, except the continual “tick—tick—tick—tick” of the clock, which seemed to be occupied in driving nails into the heavy coffin-lid of every mortal joy that time had ever brought forth.

  That same night in Nevilton House was a night of wretched hours for Lacrima, but of hours of a wretchedness more active than that which made the hermit of Dead Man’s Cottage pull the clothes over his head and turn his face to the wall, long ere the twilight had vanished from his garden.

  On leaving her friend thus abruptly, her heart full of angry revolt, Lacrima had seen the crowd of men and animals approaching, and to escape them had scrambled into a field on the border of the road. Following a little path which led across it, and crossing two more meadows, she flung herself down under the shadow of some great elms, in a sort of grassy hollow beneath an over-grown hedge, and gave full vent to her grief. The hollow in which she hid herself was a secluded and lonely spot, and no sound reached her but the monotonous summer-murmur of the flies and the rustle of the wind-troubled branches. Lying thus, prone on her face, her broad-brimmed hat with its poppy-trimmings thrown down at her side, and her limbs trembling with the violence of her sobs, Lacrima seemed to insert into that alien landscape an element of passionate feeling quite foreign to its sluggish fertility. Not alien to the spot, however, was another human form, that at the same hour had been led to wander among those lush meadows.

  The field behind the high bank and thick-set hedge which overshadowed the unhappy girl, was a large and spacious one, “put up,” as country people say, “for hay,” but as yet untouched by the mowers’ machines. Here, in the heat of the noon, walked the acquisitive Mr. John Goring, calculating the value of this crop of grass, and deciding upon the appropriate date of its cutting.

  What curious irony is it, in the blind march of events, which so frequently draws to the place of our exclusive sorrow the one particular spectator that we would most avoid? One talks lightly of coincidence and of chance; but who that has walked through life observingly has not been driven to pause with sad questioning before accidents and occurrences that seem as though some conscious malignity in things had arranged them? Are there, perhaps, actual telepathic vibrations at work about us, drawing the hunter to his prey—the prey to the hunter? Is the innocent object of persecution, hiding from its persecutors, compelled by a fatal psychic law—the law of its own terror—to call subconsciously upon the very power it is fleeing from; to betray, against its will, the path of its own retreat? Lacrima in any case, as she lay thus prostrate, her poppy-trimmed hat beside her, and her brown curls flecked with spots of sun and shadow, brought into that English landscape a strangely remote touch,—a touch of tragic and passionate colour. A sweet bruised exile, she seemed, from another region, flung down, among all this umbrag
eous rankness, to droop like a transplanted flower. Certainly the sinister magic, whatever it was, that had drawn Mr. Goring in that fatal direction, was a magic compounded of the attraction of contrary elements.

  If Mr. Romer represented the occult power of the sandstone hill, his brother-in-law was the very epitome and culmination of the valley’s inert clay. The man breathed clay, looked clay, smelt clay, understood clay, exploited clay, and in a literal sense was clay.

  If there is any truth in the scientific formula about the “survival” of those most “adapted” to their “environment,” Mr. Goring was sure of a prolonged and triumphant sojourn on this mortal globe. For his “environment” was certainly one of clay—and to clay he certainly was most prosperously “adapted.”

  It was not long before the tragic sobs of the unhappy Lacrima, borne across the field on the east-wind, arrested the farmer’s attention. He stood still, and listened, snuffing the air, like a great jungle-boar. Then with rapid but furtive steps he crossed over to where the sound proceeded, and slipping down cautiously through a gap in the hedge, made his way towards the secluded hollow, breathing heavily like an animal on a trail.

  Her fit of crying having subsided, Lacrima turned round on her back, and remained motionless, gazing up at the blue sky. Extended thus on the ruffled grass, her little fingers nervously plucking at its roots and her breast still heaving, the young girl offered a pitiful enough picture to any casual intruder. Slight and fragile though she was, the softness and charm of her figure witnessed to her Latin origin. With her dusky curls and olive complexion, she might, but for her English dress, have been taken for a strayed gipsy, recovering from some passionate quarrel with her Romany lover.

  “What’s the matter, Miss Lacrima?” was the farmer’s greeting as his gross form obtruded itself against the sky-line.