Those two inanimate things seemed still to be holding the echo of a conversation. Armstrong could almost hear the wooden words. The one suave and thin, but how determined, the other with a show of firmness, rising into unabated irritation, and losing itself in empty expectations. Then, when expostulations failed, a despairing effort towards retreat with a fiery dignity that could not, alas! but be pompous in its own despite. The chairs could not be quit of the subjects of their conversation.
At first they were talking about Arthur and his career; Mr Delane-Morton, with his almost womanish instinct, pleading for his offspring, but gradually won round to the point of view from which it could be manifestly seen that no Morton ever worked for his living: he merely supplemented his allowance by choosing one of three careers. But why choose the Church when the boy disliked it so particularly? urged the smaller chair, its cushion sliding more and more askew in agitation.
Because there was a living in the Morton gift most opportunely, and what a lot you can save in that way, returned the other with a solid conviction.
The smaller chair did not combat the need of saving: the edges of its cushion were too obviously worn. It looked with heated earnestness at the other’s well-appointed padding, and its envy rose to wrath.
There were angry words spoken to which Armstrong had no cue. Perhaps the worn cushion reproached the well-preserved padding for its appearance, and asked it to sacrifice some of its sleekness for the general credit of the Mortons, and of Arthur Morton in particular. There certainly was a plenished firmness about the padding of that greater chair which affirmed some substance. The significance did not strike one all at once: at first it seemed only an outside adornment, but now one saw that it had more solid foundation.
There was almost an aggressiveness about its affluence viewed from such a standpoint; before it had seemed discreet enough. That there should be power in an armchair is an evident absurdity, but it has a negative strength of resistance which might equally justify the word. At this moment it did not appear to deny the force which up to now it had kept tactfully in the background, unobtrusive. It had cunning then, too, that greater chair, it was provocative besides. Other qualities it had beneath the bland smoothness of its covering which the vacant polish of the other’s wooden surface did not allow. But still the smaller chair was constructed of solid wood, whereas this chair was merely a frame padded with horse-hair. A splinter from the wood were sufficient to cut holes in the softer substance. The question was—could the wood splinter? The greater chair was scornful of its neighbour, despising it through the course of many years, during which period that smaller chair had come more and more within its shadow.
A door banged in the distance, and Armstrong started; the chairs had suddenly turned monumentally silent. They were furniture again, not prototypes. He wondered why he should have thought they spoke as antagonists at all. It was the effect of this curious house upon him, where nothing was open or real.
The gong for luncheon sounded, and the whole family appeared from their several quarters. There was a chastened air about Mr Delane-Morton that throughout the meal plunged him into absent-minded lapses, from which he seemed to recover with extreme difficulty. Arthur was silent as usual, but a little more morose. Miss Josephine crumbled her bread nervously, looking less approachable than ever before. Aunt Ellen and Godfrey alone appeared to have preserved a state of satisfaction within themselves conducive to sociability. They both bore on their countenances that kind of underlying self-gratulation which almost makes for radiance in a face: their affairs this morning had evidently prospered. Armstrong, remembering the scarlet garment, wondered how much effect it had produced in rendering the young man so benign. When the domestics’ services were dispensed with there was nothing he would not do in the way of waiting on everyone else. He seemed bitten with a mania of attentiveness which was really overpowering. Nothing could stop him except the conclusion of the meal. It was two o’clock before Armstrong managed to evade them all and escape upstairs to the gallery, and the door which led on to the downs. The two wild wood-creatures leered at him with sympathetic benevolence.
VII
The Story of the Stone
AT LENGTH HE WAS FREE; in his haste he forgot to shut the door of the gallery behind him, and the cold air gushed out after and along with him up the green slopes outside. It was riotous within him, and riotous without along the short grass, boisterous among the dark racing clouds. There was a shadow from the clouds that ran across the sward under his feet and went quickly in advance of him to the summit of the ascent, rose to the ridge and vanished away on the other side of the crest out of sight. The downs were a perfect mirror to the expansive heavens. The wonderful air filled him through and through with that same feeling of eternal youth, eternal age that he had caught in St. Michael’s church—that same winged feeling and quickening of every part which was like an inrush of new life and power. He could feel the extraordinary thing invading him as it invaded the whole hillside. He let himself be swept away upon its tide. It were inconceivable that such a force should be pent up in any house or building made with hands.
By this time he had come to the white chalk path that cut up from the left-hand and plunged into the plantation, turning back again elbow-wise to slant upwards to the very summit of the down. He followed it. It was not until he set foot inside the plantation that he wondered at himself for having given that sensation a distinct personality of its own. It seemed strange now that he was within shelter of the trees, that he should have regarded it as anything but the effect upon himself of the exhilarating atmosphere. And yet that he now tried to deny its existence added proof of that personality’s appearance. Then why had he matched it with the sensation in St. Michael’s church? No, he was on the downs now, and would only think about the fine effect upon eye and mind that such a noble picture presented.
He was almost at the top: he would not look around or behind him until the summit was attained. The face of the down was rounded here, like the side of a giant sandcastle made by a giant pail, or else it was the end of some titanic bastion. Panting, he achieved the last strides quickly, and turning gazed around. He could have shouted for joy. The world for centuries lay stripped bare about him. In the whole of England he had never seen Nature so frankly self-confessed. His heart went out to her. And not Nature alone was thus revealed, but the history of man for thousands of years written visibly upon the face of the earth. He felt himself sinking down wave-like abysses into darkness, and tossed up again on wave-like mountains into light.
The years he saw were so old that they could not be numbered. When he contemplated them the world grew dark: he could not see it in the sun; it emerged out of chaos with the rumour and shadow of a horror still upon it.
Something within him crumbled and vanished, whilst a hideous cold terror grasped him by the throat. The Unknown appeared in a vision to primeval man. The wave lifted him again.
Again he was Armstrong, scanning Nature’s page with a discerning eye.
The lines and outlines of that scene were all noble, all significant with many meanings. In front, where the land lay low, the lakes and swamps had lain; and there, where a jagged hill rose abruptly from the plain, you could tell how the erosion of time and tide had carved it asunder from the main chain of the chalk-ridge. But on either hand how little had the country changed. It rolled and curved, swooped and rose, with the heavy motion of vast waters checked by their own volume; and no water could have so reflected each change and mood of the sky. Behind him for miles upon miles the great ocean of the downs swept away out of sight, and so they did on either hand.
Since a remote day in his youth, when he had first realised a hill as the result of some gigantic thought, he had not felt such exhilaration or excitement.
He was standing in the folds of a Saxon camp; to his left the straight lines of a Roman road cut clean through a wood of leafless trees. Below lay the mediaeval village, and the road which ran there spoke of travellers
of so recent a date that they seemed his own kith and kin. Behind him along the top of the ridge a third road ran, marked with a milestone, saying that in the year 1792 men had counted here a hundred miles from London. The presence of his own century came upon him with a sudden shock that struck him cold.
He felt suddenly immeasurably old and alien, tired too. It seemed as if he had gone hungering down many ages.
On the blue headland of a hill, where brown trees shrouded it and green fields spread before, the dismantled site of a great convent still looked out towards the plain; and back again the grass-grown hillock—all that remained of a medieval castle—returned its stare. Perhaps he had more traffic with them; but nothing to be reckoned compared with the old tales of the down.
To his right—westward—he started off to walk along the straight way of the downs, going along the old Roman road in its covering of woodland, far away into a distance that seemed familiar yet unknown. He went very quickly with a light step, and the darkness began to come over him once more.
Turning a little inland, the valley became lost to sight; now there was not a single house except one grey farm, which lay at the end of a row of twisted elms in a dimple of the ground. It had such a wise forlorn look that Armstrong coveted its ownership. To be so alone in possession of such secrets, being free to peruse them all the year through, pleased his imagination. He wished his fate had placed him there instead of in Burton Hall. ‘Some day,’ he said to himself, ‘I will go there and grow incomparably wise.’ There were brown ploughed fields around it, and fields where some sheep grazed; but it had a poor appearance which gave it also an air of asceticism. That pleased him too.
Some queer thorn-bushes with fantastic shapes supplied a sense of the humorous; the wind had evidently disported itself amongst them; they made game of themselves along the shelving sides. A touch of colour too moved out across the green. The woman of the scarlet garment—a cloak which billowed in the wind—walked up the avenue and vanished into the house.
She pleased his eye: he wondered a little about her before the farm was lost to sight.
A few more ploughed fields remained to be skirted, and then the open down lay before him. True there were some enclosures of wire-fencing, but they lost themselves amongst the prevailing green. Although there was no track visible to the eye, his feet did seem to be following some trodden way; even the retaining surface of the chalk preserved no trace, and yet he felt convinced of following some road. The trend of the downs led upwards, he was always mounting, and the horizon grew wider and bluer and more luminous. A kind of vague lustre lay upon them all, clearer or lighter about the edges, deepening in blueness as their curves descended. The imagination could not have conceived such a variety in lines: they had almost become rhythmic, like harmonies in a score—well scored indeed.
There was no sign of a human creature anywhere on the face of the land now, only these rhythmic curves of earth swelling and falling, until a muted sound seemed to rise out of them like the voice of a crowd deadened by long distance: it clamoured in his ears and yet there was nothing. He knew, too, that he had command of a most complete sanity. At first the sound seemed far behind him, but gradually it gathered volume on every side, coming from right and left—north, south, and west, he was invaded by the strange rumour; only eastward there was silence and a sensation of tense expectancy with quiet. It might only have been the blood throbbing in his temples but it was not. He must have gone some miles, for he was walking at a great pace, when the ground before him sloped suddenly down into a wide valley—the place where a river had been. On the slope opposite a rough terrace was scored slantwise in the meagre grass spread across the chalk’s surface. It lay there like a huge scar, cut from the summit of the opposite incline almost to the foot of the slope, but stopping where the bank of the stream must once have been.
Armstrong recognised it at once: one of the old cattle-tracks, worn by the continual passing of innumerable herds coming to water at the stream below that hill. The hill on this side had a somewhat strange shape, evidently moulded by the hands of that ancient race rather than by the mere forces of nature: it might have been a primitive outpost, or a safe place where the cattle could be kept from invading hordes of men or wild beasts. He strode down the valley and up the track on the other side. It seemed as if the herds had only passed a moment ago, having merely vanished out of sight over the crest. And again the sound of roaring voices assailed him on all sides; this time the presence of multitudes was more pronounced, though the noise was just as dim. He was suddenly confronted with the sense of an extraordinary fear.
It had grown up within him unaware. It belonged to something within him that was as old as the track by which he walked, and with which his normal self had no contact whatever. It could not be controlled by reasons, however argued. He was tossed from heat to cold, blinded, deafened. The ground began to sway under his feet, the very sky trembled about the hill-waves on the horizon; his very life seemed to be torn out of him in aching pain. His thoughts crumbled into ashes at one blow, and left him helpless. There was no foothold for his mind, it stood naked, disarmed, trembling before this enormous fear. It was old and rude as the scarred hills, but it was vital and imminent.
He could not see the country as he had seen it an hour ago: the face of it was changed. With the eyes of fear, that was becoming horror, he saw the entire place teem and heave with life; the air stung bitingly with its bitter force. The earth seemed about to cry aloud. He had never felt such intense agony surround him on every side. It smelt of blood.
Armstrong had now ascended the hill, and beyond the downs rolled gently in mild undulations like little floating islands: but they too swayed on the vast undercurrent of terror. He fled onwards, the trend of the ground carrying him upward with it: there were always more and more hills to climb.
Now in front of him there rose a great earthwork with a crumbled ditch between; it sprang up against the sky showing gnarled edges, like the knuckles of a clenched fist. He knew that he must enter that place, and yet he was more afraid than ever. Again earth and sky swayed about him. In the distance the downs showed almost prismatic with that illumined whiteness which contains all colour.
He climbed the ditch and the bank beyond. there was a second, and again a third. This three-fold enclosure endowed the place with a feeling of assured security and reserve which was in some way stronger than if it had been set about with the greatest masses of masonry. There was, besides, a shuddering silence or vacuity that waited—and waited for what?
The space which the trenches enclosed formed a large and almost regular square: it did not appear to be cut according to the trend of the ground or the shape of the hill summit, but was rather cast at an angle, slantwise, as if with an intention. In the centre the ground suddenly sank in a hollow, as if it had fallen in upon the removal of some object once embedded there—just as a grave might when the coffin is displaced. There was a deep notch cut in the earthwork eastward, and a straight line could have been drawn from notch to hollow. In a flash Armstrong saw what was wanting to that cavity—a stone.
In a flash, too, he saw why the place lay so. It was strictly orientated. Eastward the downs swung forward in deeper folds, and the swing of that fear swept eastward also as down a long avenue: and yet there were no stone lines.
Armstrong did not know where he stood with regard to Salisbury Plain, but he felt certain that Stonehenge lay facing that notch in the earthwork, however many miles away. He did not name the place in his mind, but he saw it suddenly upsprung as a temple to that strange horror and that immense vitality which surged from the spur of the down at Burton, swept on through this dead stronghold, and culminated in Stonehenge. It was winged, and it was shadowed with its wings. In the church they had called it St Michael—it was gentle in the valley: but here, where it was unchecked and free, where men had been virile enough to clutch at its robe in passing, to partly comprehend and catch it, to lay even a hand upon its power and curb something
of its strength to their outreaching wills, it swooped and circled like a giant eagle, rushed and eddied like a torrent released. At this moment it had sped on somewhere across the down, and its absence was almost more terrific than its presence; for the heart felt a suspense within that turned its blood to water. That such a thing could be! He could not tell how he had arrived at his knowledge, he knew only that it was true. A place too where generations of men had stood in similar terror was not a thing unendowed with meaning: their fear was trebly communicable for its formlessness, its quiet, and its incomprehensibility.
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