Wood and Stone

by John Cowper Powys

  There came over him, at other times, as he inhaled the cool, hushed air from the slumbering fields, and surveyed the great regal planet,—Mr. Romer’s star, he thought grimly,—as it hung so formidably close to the silvery pallid moon, a queer dreamy feeling that the whole thing were a scene in a play or a story, absolutely unreal; and that he would only have to rouse himself and shake off the unnatural spell, to have his brother with him again, alive and in full consciousness.

  The odd thing about it was that he found himself refusing to believe that this was his brother at all,—this mask beneath the white sheet,—and even fancying that at any moment the familiar voice might call to him from the garden, and he have to descend to unlock the door.

  That thought of his brother’s voice sent a pang through him of sick misgiving. Surely it couldn’t be possible, that never, not through the whole of eternity, would he hear that voice again?

  He moved to the window and listened. Owls were hooting somewhere up at Wild Pine, and from the pastures towards Hullaway came the harsh cry of a night-jar.

  He gazed up at the glittering heavens, sprinkled with those proud constellations whose identity it was one of his pastimes to recognize. How little they cared! How appallingly little they cared! What a farce, what an obscene, unpardonable farce, the whole business was!

  He caught the sound of an angry bark in some distant yard.

  Luke cursed the irrelevant intrusive noise. “Ah! thou vile Larva!” he muttered. “What! Shall a dog, a cat, a rat, have life; and thou no breath at all?”

  He leant far out of the window, breathing the perfumes of the night. He noticed, as an interesting fact, that it was neither the phloxes nor the late roses whose scent filled the air, but that new exotic tobacco-plant,—a thing whose sticky, quickly-fading, trumpet-shaped petals were one of his brother’s especial aversions.

  The immense spaces of the night, as they carried his gaze onward from one vast translunar sign to another, filled him with a strange feeling of the utter unimportance of any earthly event. The Mythology of Power and the Mythology of Sacrifice might wrestle in desperate contention for the mastery; but what mattered, in view of this great dome which overshadowed them, the victory or the defeat of either? Mythologies were they both; both woven out of the stuff of dreams, and both vanishing like dreams, in the presence of this stark image upon the bed!

  He returned to his brother’s side, and rocked himself up and down on his creaking bedroom chair. “Dead and gone!” he muttered, “dead and gone!”

  It was easy to deal in vague mystic speculation. But what relief could he derive, he who wanted his brother back as he was, with his actual tones, and ways and looks, from any problematic chance that some thin “spiritual principle,” or ideal wraith, of the man were now wandering through remote, unearthly regions? The darling of his soul—the heart of his heart—had become forever this appalling waxen image, this thing that weighed upon him with its presence!

  Luke bent over the dead man. What a personality, what a dominant and oppressive personality, a corpse has! It is not the personality of the living man, but another—a quite different one—masquerading in his place.

  Luke felt almost sure that this husk, this shell, this mockery of the real James, was possessed of some detestable consciousness of its own, a consciousness as remote from that of the man he loved as that pallid forehead with the deep purple gash across it, was remote from the dear head whose form he knew so well. How crafty, how malignant, a corpse was!

  He returned to his uncomfortable chair and pondered upon what this loss meant to him. It was like the burying alive of half his being. How could he have thoughts, sensations, feelings, fancies; how could he have loves and hates, without James to tell them to? A cold sick terror of life passed through him, of life without this companion of his soul. He felt like a child lost in some great forest.

  “Daddy James! Daddy James!” he cried, “I want you;—I want you!”

  He found himself repeating this infantile conjuration over and over again. He battered with clenched hand upon the adamantine wall of silence. But there was neither sign nor voice nor token nor “any that regarded.” There was only the beating of his own heart and the ticking of the watch upon the table. And all the while, with its malignant cunning, the corpse regarded him, mute, derisive, contemptuous.

  He thought, lightly and casually, as one who at the grave of all he loves plucks a handful of flowers, of the girls he had just parted from, and of Gladys and all his other infatuations. How impossible it seemed to him that a woman—a girl—that any one of these charming, distracting creatures—should strike a man down by their loss, as he was now stricken down.

  He tried to imagine what he would feel if it were Annie lying there, under the sheet, in place of James. He would be sorry; he would be bitterly sad; he would be angry with the callous heavens; but as long as James were near, as long as James were by his side,—his life would still be his life. He would suffer, and the piteous tragedy of the thing would smite and sicken him; but it would not be the same. It would not be like this!

  What was there in the love of a man that made the loss of it—for him at least—so different a thing? Was it that with women, however much one loved them, there was something equivocal, evasive, intangible; something made up of illusion and sorcery, of magic and moonbeams; that since it could never be grasped as firmly as the other, could never be as missed as the other, when the grasp had to relax? Or was it that, for all their clear heads,—heads so much clearer than poor James’!—and for all their spiritual purity,—there was lacking in them a certain indescribable mellowness of sympathy, a certain imaginative generosity and tolerance, which meant the true secret of the life lived in common?

  From the thought of his girls, Luke’s mind wandered back to the thought of what the constant presence of his brother as a background to his life had really meant. Even as he sat there, gazing so hopelessly at the image on the bed, he found himself on the point of resolving to explain all these matters to James and hear his opinion upon them.

  By degrees, as the dawn approached, the two blank holes into cavernous darkness which the windows of the chamber had become, changed their character. A faint whitish-blue transparency grew visible within their enclosing frames, and something ghostly and phantom-like, the stealthy invasion of a new presence, glided into the room.

  This palpable presence, the frail embryo of a new day, gave to the yellow candle-flames a queer sickly pallor and intensified to a chalky opacity the dead whiteness of the sheet, and of the folded hands resting upon it. It was with the sound of the first twittering birds, and the first cock-crow, that the ice-cold spear of desolation pierced deepest of all into Luke’s heart. He shivered, and blew out the candles.

  A curious feeling possessed him that, in a sudden ghastly withdrawal, that other James, the James he had been turning to all night in tacit familiar appeal, had receded far out of his reach. From indistinct horizons his muffled voice moaned for a while, like the wind in the willows of Lethe, and then died away in a thin long-drawn whisper. Luke was alone; alone with his loss and alone with the image of death.

  He moved to the window and looked out. Streaks of watery gold were already visible above the eastern uplands, and a filmy sea of white mist swayed and fluttered over the fields.

  All these things together, the white mist, the white walls of the room, the white light, the white covering on the body, seemed to fall upon the worn-out watcher with a weight of irresistible finality. James was dead—“gone to his death-bed;—he never would come again!”

  Turning his back wearily upon those golden sky-streaks, that on any other occasion would have thrilled him with their magical promise, Luke observed the dead bodies of no less than five large moths grouped around the extinct candles. Two of them were “currant-moths,” one a “yellow under-wing,” and the others beyond his entomological knowledge. This was the only holocaust, then, allowed to the dead man. Five moths! And the Milky Way had looked down
upon their destruction with the same placidity as upon the cause of the vigil that slew them.

  Luke felt a sudden desire to escape from this room, every object of which bore now, in dimly obscure letters, the appalling handwriting of the ministers of fate. He crept on tiptoe to the door and opened it stealthily. Making a mute valedictory gesture towards the bed, he shut the door behind him and slipped down the little creaking stairs.

  He entered his landlady’s kitchen, and as silently as he could collected a bundle of sticks and lit the fire. The crackling flames produced an infinitesimal lifting of the cloud which weighed upon his spirit. He warmed his hands before the blaze. From some remote depth within him, there began to awake once more the old inexpugnable zest for life.

  Piling some pieces of coal upon the burning wood and drawing the kettle to the edge of the hob, he left the kitchen; and crossing the little hall, impregnated with a thin sickly odor of lamp-oil, he shot back the blots of the house-door, and let himself out into the morning air.

  A flock of starlings fluttered away over the meadow, and from the mist-wreathed recesses of Nevilton House gardens came the weird defiant scream of a peacock.

  He glanced furtively, as if such a glance were almost sacrilegious, at the open windows of his brother’s room; and then pushing open the garden-gate emerged into the dew-drenched field. He could not bring himself to leave the neighbourhood of the house, but began pacing up and down the length of the meadow, from the hedge adjacent to the railway, to that elm-shadowed corner, where not so many weeks ago he had distracted himself with Annie and Phyllis. He continued this reiterated pacing,—his tired brain giving itself up to the monotony of a heart-easing movement,—until the sun had risen quite high above the horizon. The great fiery orb pleased him well, in its strong indifference, as with its lavish beams it dissipated the mist and touched the tree-trunks with ruddy colour.

  “Ha!” he cried aloud, “the sun is the only God! To the sun must all flesh turn, if it would live and not die!”

  Half ashamed of this revival of his spirits he obeyed the beckoning gestures of the station-master’s wife, who now appeared at the door.

  The good woman’s sympathy, though not of the silent or tactful order, was well adapted to prevent the immediate return of any hopeless grief.

  “’Tis good it were a Saturday when the Lord took him,” she said, pouring out for her lodger a steaming cup of excellent tea, and buttering a slice of bread; “he’ll have Sunday to lie up in. It be best of all luck for these poor stiff ones, to have church bells rung over ’em.”

  “I pray Heaven I shan’t have any visitors today,” remarked Luke, sipping his tea and stretching out his feet to the friendly blaze.

  “That ye’ll be sure to have!” answered the woman; “and the sooner ye puts on a decent black coat, and washes and brushes up a bit, the better ’twill be for all concerned. I always tells my old man that when he do fall stiff, like what your brother be, I shall put on my black silk gown and sit in the front parlour with a bottle of elder wine, ready for all sorts and conditions.”

  Luke rose, with a piece of bread-and-butter in his hand, and surveyed himself in the mirror.

  “Yes, I do need a bit of tidying,” he said. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind my shaving down here?”

  Even as he spoke the young stone-carver could not help recalling those sinister stories of dead men whose beards have grown in their coffins. The landlady nodded.

  “I’ll make ’ee up a bed for these ’ere days,” she said, “in Betty’s room. As for shaving and such like, please yourself, Master Luke. This house be thy house with him lying up there.”

  Between nine and ten o’clock Luke’s first visitor made his appearance. This was Mr. Clavering, who showed himself neither surprised nor greatly pleased to find the bereft brother romping with the children under the station-master’s apple-trees.

  “I cannot express to you the sympathy I feel,” said the clergyman, “with your grief under this great blow. Words on these occasions are of little avail. But I trust you know where to turn for true consolation.”

  “Thank you, sir,” replied Luke, who, though carefully shaved and washed, still wore the light grey flannel suit of his Saturday’s excursion.

  “Give Mr. Clavering an apple, Lizzie!” he added.

  “I wouldn’t for a moment,” continued the Reverend Hugh, “intrude upon you with any impertinent questions. But I could not help wondering as I walked through the village how this tragedy would affect you. I prayed it might,”—here he laid a grave and pastoral hand on the young man’s arm,—“I prayed it might give you a different attitude to those high matters which we have at various times discussed together. Am I right in my hope, Luke?”

  Never had the superb tactlessness of Nevilton’s vicar betrayed him more deplorably.

  “Death is death, Mr. Clavering,” replied the stone-carver, lifting up the youngest of the children and placing her astride on an apple-branch. “It’s about the worst blow fate’s ever dealt me. But when it comes to any change in my ideas,—no! I can’t say that I’ve altered.”

  “I understand you weren’t with him when this terrible thing happened,” said the clergyman. “They tell me he was picked up by strangers. There’ll be no need, I trust, for an inquest, or anything of that kind?”

  Luke shook his head. “The doctor was up here last night. The thing’s clear enough. His mind must have given way again. He’s had those curst quarries on his nerves for a long while past. I wish to the devil—I beg your pardon, sir!—I wish I’d taken him to Weymouth with me. I was a fool not to insist on that.”

  “Yes, I heard you were away,” remarked Hugh, with a certain caustic significance in his tone. “One or two of our young friends were with you, I believe?”

  Luke did not fail to miss the implication, and he hit back vindictively.

  “I understand you’ve had an interesting little service this morning, sir, or perhaps it’s yet to come off? I can’t help being a bit amused when I think of it!”

  An electric shock of anger thrilled through Clavering’s frame. Controlling himself with a heroic effort, he repelled the malignant taunt.

  “I didn’t know you concerned yourself with these observances, Andersen,” he remarked. “But you’re quite right. I’ve just this minute come from receiving Miss Romer into our church. Miss Traffio was with her. Both young ladies were greatly agitated over this unhappy occurrence. In fact it cast quite a gloom over what otherwise is one of the most beautiful incidents of all, in our ancient ritual.”

  Luke swung the little girl on the bough backwards and forwards. The other children, retired to a discreet distance, stared at the colloquy with wide-open eyes.

  “This baptizing of adults,” continued Luke,—“you call ’em adults, don’t you, on these occasions?—is really a little funny, isn’t it?”

  “Funny!” roared the angry priest. “No, sir, it isn’t funny! The saving of an immortal soul by God’s most sacred sacrament may not appeal to you infidels as an essential ceremony,—but only a thoroughly vulgar and philistine mind could call it funny!”

  “I’m afraid we shall never agree on these topics, Mr. Clavering,” replied Luke calmly. “But it was most kind of you to come up and see me. I really appreciate it. Would it be possible,”—his voice took a lower and graver tone,—“for my brother’s funeral to be performed on Wednesday? I should be very grateful to you, sir, if that could be arranged.”

  The young vicar frowned and looked slightly disconcerted. “What time would you wish it to be, Andersen?” he enquired. “I ask you this, because Wednesday is—er—unfortunately—the date fixed for another of these ceremonies that you scoff at. The Lord Bishop comes to Nevilton then. It is his own wish. I should myself have preferred a later date.”

  “Ha! the confirmation!” ejaculated Luke, with a bitter little laugh. “You’re certainly bent on striking while the iron’s hot, Mr. Clavering. May I ask what hour has been fixed for this beautiful ceremony?”
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  “Eleven o’clock in the morning,” replied the priest, ignoring with a dignified wave of his hand the stone-carver’s jeering taunt.

  “Well then—if that suits you—and does not interfere with the Lord Bishop—” said Luke, “I should be most grateful if you could make the hour for James’ funeral, ten o’clock in the morning? That service I happen to be more familiar with than the others,—and I know it doesn’t take very long.”

  Mr. Clavering bent his head in assent.

  “It shall certainly be as you wish,” he said. “If unforeseen difficulties arise, I will let you know. But I have no doubt it can be managed.

  “I am right in assuming,” he added, a little uneasily, “that your brother was a baptized member of our church?”

  Luke lifted the child from the bough and made her run off to play with the others. The glance he then turned upon the vicar of Nevilton was not one of admiration.

  “James was the noblest spirit I’ve ever known,” he said sternly. “If there is such a thing as another world, he is certain to reach it—church or no church. As a matter of fact, if it is at all important to you, he was baptized in Nevilton. You’ll find his name in the register—and mine too!” he added with a laugh.

  Mr. Clavering kept silence, and moved towards the gate. Luke followed him, and at the gate they shook hands. Perhaps the same thought passed through the minds of both of them, as they went through this ceremony; for a very queer look, almost identical in its expression on either face, was exchanged between them.

  Before the morning was over Luke had a second visit of condolence. This was from Mr. Quincunx, and never had the quaint recluse been more warmly received. Luke was conscious at once that here was a man who could enter into every one of his feelings, and be neither horrified nor scandalized by the most fantastic inconsistency.