John Cowper Powys

“ Gladys rose too, and standing behind her cousin, put her arms round her waist.
“No, I am sure he doesn’t realize how sweet you are,” she whispered. “You darling little thing,—you little, shy, frightened thing—you must tell me all about it! I’ll try not to tease you—I really will! What a clever, naughty little girl, it has been, peeping and glancing at a poor elderly farmer and inflaming his simple heart! But all your friends are rather well advanced in age, aren’t they, dear? I expect uncle John is really no older than Mr. Quincunx or James Andersen. ”

“ Every leaf and grass blade seemed to be intently alert and listening.
In her heart Lacrima was conscious of an unusual sense of foreboding and apprehension. Surely there could be nothing worse in store for her than what she already suffered. She wondered what Maurice Quincunx was doing at that moment. Was he thinking of her, and were his thoughts the cause of this strange oppression in the air? Poor Maurice! She longed to be free to devote herself to him, to smooth his path, to distract his mind. Would fate ever make such a thing possible? How unfair Gladys was in her suspicions! ”

“ James Andersen looked frowningly at the window.
The curtains were not drawn; and a dark ash-branch stretched itself across the casement like an extended threatening arm. Its form was made visible by a gap in the surrounding trees, through which a little cluster of stars faintly twinkled. The cloud veil had melted.
“What a world this is!” the stone-carver thought to himself. His tone when he spoke was irritable and aggrieved.
“How silly you are, Ninsy—with your fancies! A man can’t be civil to a poor lonesome foreign wench, without your girding at him as if he had done something wrong! ”

“ When she said the words, “I do love you,” a shivering ecstasy shot through the stone-carver’s veins, followed by a ghastly chilliness, like the hand of death, as he grasped their complete meaning. The most devastating tone, perhaps, of all, for an impassioned lover to hear, is that particular tone of calm tender affection. It has the power of closing up vistas of hope more effectively than the expression of the most vigorous repulsion. There was a ring of weary finality in her voice that echoed through his mind, like the tread of coffin-bearers through a darkened passage. ”

“ I hate the weak; and I refuse to let them interfere with me! Look at the faces of these people. Well,—you know, Gladys, what they are like. They are all feeble, bloodless, sneaking, fawning idiots! I hate the faces of these Nevilton fools. They are always making me think of slugs and worms. This Wone is typical. His disgusting complexion and flabby mouth is characteristic of them all. No one of them has the spirit to hit one properly back, face to face. And their odious, sentimental religion!—This Clavering of yours ought to know better. He is not quite devoid of intelligence. ”

“ John Goring might whistle for his bride.”
“I hate Lacrima!” cried Gladys, with a sudden access of her normal spirit.
“I don’t care two pence about Lacrima,” returned Luke. “It is of James I am thinking.”
“But she would be happy with James, and I don’t want her to be happy.”
“What a little devil you are!” exclaimed the stone-carver, slipping his arm round her waist.
“Yes, I know I am,” she answered shamelessly. “I suppose I inherit it from father. He hates people just like that. But I am not a devil with you, Luke, am I? I wish I were!” she added, after a little pause. ”

“ The whole world, looked at with the bold cynical eye of one who was not afraid to face the truth, was, after all, a mad, wild, unmeaning struggle; and, in the confused arena of this struggle, one could be sure of nothing but the pleasure one derived from the sensation of one’s own power. He tried, as he walked towards the girls, to imagine to himself what his feelings would be, supposing he yielded to these remote scruples, and let Lacrima go, giving her money, for instance, to enable her to live independently in her own country, or to marry whom she pleased. ”

“ And then, as he stared at the three girlish figures on the beach, there came over him the strange illusion that both Vennie and Lacrima were only dream-people—unreal and fantastic—and that the true living persons of his drama were himself and his little Neapolitan waif.
Suppose the three girls were to take a boat—one of those boats whose painted keels he saw glittering now so pleasantly on the beach—and row out into the water. And suppose the boat were upset and both Vennie and Lacrima drowned? Would he be so sad to have to live the rest of his life alone with the little Dolores? ”

“ Taxater, use your influence to strengthen him against this girl’s treachery. She only means him harm, I know she does! And if a person like you, whom he loves and admires so much, talked to him seriously about it, it would be such a help to him. He is so young. He is a mere boy, and absolutely ignorant of the world. He does not even realize that the village has already begun its horrid gossip about them. Do—do, do something, Mr. Taxater. It is like that young Parsifal, in the play, being tempted by the enchantress.”
“But how do they meet?” asked the diplomatist, with unchanged gravity. ”

“ It is in the Nevilton churchyard, when a new grave is being dug, that this sinister peculiarity of the earth-floor is especially noticeable. The sight of those raw, rough heaps of yellow clay, tossed out upon grass and flowers, is enough to make the living shrink back in terror from the oblong hole into which they have consigned their dead. All human cemeteries smell, like the hands of the Shakespearean king, of forlorn mortality; but such mortality seems more palpably, more oppressively emphasized among the graves of Nevilton than in other repositories of the dead. ”

“ Life in the world of men was indeed a complicated and entangled matter. She had turned, in her agitation about the stone-carver, and in her reaction from Mr. Taxater’s reserve, straight to the person she loved best of all; and this was her reward,—a mere crude outburst of masculine jealousy!
They rounded the corner by her own gate, where the road to Athelston deviates at right angles. James Andersen was no longer in sight.
“Where the devil has the man got to?” cried the astonished clergyman, raging at himself for his ill-temper, and raging at Vennie for having been the witness of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As these two girls, the fair-haired and the dark-haired, let the solemn burden of the night thus press unheeded upon them, they would have needed no fantastic imagination, in an invisible observer, to be aware of the tense vibration between them of some formidable spiritual encounter.
High up above the mass of Leonian stone which we have named Nevilton House, the Milky Way trailed its mystery of far-off brightness across the incredible gulfs. What to it was the fact that one human heart should tremble like a captured bird in the remorseless power of another? ”

“ The triumphant quarry-owner rested from his labors under the pleasant warmth of the drowsy August skies; and as, in the old Homeric Olympus, a relapse into lethargy of the wielder of thunder-bolts was attended by a cessation of earthly strife, so in the Nevilton world, the elements of discord and opposition fell, during this siesta of the master of Leo’s Hill, into a state of quiescent inertia.
But though the gods might sleep, and the people might relax and play, the watchful unwearied fates spun on, steadily and in silence, their ineluctable threads. ”

“ Through a gap in the foliage he could perceive the valley below; he could even perceive the outline of the roof of Nevilton House. But against the magic of those carved pinnacles he had found a counter-charm. In the hushed stillness about him, he seemed conscious of the power of all these entangled growing things as a sinister heathen influence pulling him earthward.
Men differ curiously from one another in this respect. To some among them the influences of what we call Nature are in harmony with all that is good in them, and have a soothing and mystical effect. ”

“ Her general air was an air of playful passivity; but at one moment, imprinting a kiss on the girl’s arm as, in the process of arranging her veil, it brushed across her cheek, she seemed almost anxious to convey to Lacrima the full implication of her real feeling.
Never has a human caress been so electric with the vibrations of antipathy, as was that kiss. She followed up this signal of animosity by a series of feline taunts relative to John Goring, one of which, from its illuminated insight into the complex strata of the girl’s soul, delighted her by its effect. ”

“ Where the devil had his angry brother gone? Luke’s passionate anxiety began to give place to a certain indignant reaction. Why were people so ridiculous? These volcanic outbursts of ungoverned emotion on trifling occasions were just the things that spoiled the harmony and serenity of life. Where, on earth, could James have slipped off to? He remembered that they had more than once gone together to the King’s Arms—the unpretentious Hullaway tavern. It was just within the bounds of possibility that the wanderer, finding their other haunts chill and unappealing, had taken refuge there. ”

“ Out of the depths of this chaotic universe he, Luke Andersen, had been flung. It must be his first concern to sweep aside, as irrelevant and meaningless, any mere human fancies, ill-based and adventitious, upon which his free foot might stumble. To strike craftily and boldly in defence of the person he loved best in the world seemed to him not only natural but commendable. How should he be content to indulge in vague sentimental shilly-shallying, when the whole happiness of his beloved Daddy James was at stake? ”

“ 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. ”

“ This honourable shielding of the woman we have sinned with, at every kind of cost to others, has been the cause of endless misery. Do you think you are preparing a happy marriage for your Gladys in your ‘honourable’ reticence? By saving her from this union with Mr. Dangelis—whom, by the way, she surely cannot love, if she loves you—you will be doing her the best service possible. Even if she refuses to make you her husband in his place—and I suppose her infatuation would stop at that!—there are other ways, besides marriage, of hiding her embarrassed condition. ”

“ In these things Lacrima’s Latin blood gave her a certain maturity of feeling, and emphasized the maternal element in her attachment.
She contemplated dreamily the smooth bare walls of the cavernous arena in which she sat. Their coolness and dampness was not unpleasant after the heat of the upper air, but there was something sepulchral about them, something that gave the girl the queer impression of a colossal tomb—a tomb whose scattered bones might even now be lying, washed by centuries of rain, under the rank weeds of these heaps of rubble. ”

“ A girl’s children, so her friend had often maintained, do not belong to the father at all. The father is nothing—a mere irrelevant incident, a mere chance. The mother alone—the mother always—has the rights and pleasures, as she has the responsibilities and pains of the parental relation. She even recalled one occasion of twilight philosophizing in the potato-bed, when Mr. Quincunx had gone so far as to maintain the unscientific thesis that children, born where there is no love, inherit character, appearance, tastes, everything—from the mother. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I leave people alone. I prefer to watch them develop on their own lines. The last thing I should wish to do would be to meddle with Vennie’s religious taste. It would be a blunder as well as an impertinence. Vennie would be the first to resist any such proceeding. It would destroy her respect for me. It might even destroy her affection for me. It certainly would not move her. Indeed, dear lady, if I wished to plant the child’s soul irrevocably in the soil prepared by our good vicar I could not do anything more effective than try to persuade her of its deficiencies. ”

“ Vast unfathomable tides of cosmic conflict drive us all backwards and forwards; and if under the ascendance of Sirius in the track of the Sun, the master of Nevilton found himself devoting more energy to the humiliation of his daughter’s companion than to his election to the British Parliament, one can only remember that both of them—the strong and the weak—were merely puppets and pawns of elemental forces, compared with which he, as well as she, was as the chaff before the wind. ”

“ The wood-pigeons keep up a perpetual murmur, all the summer long, in these untrodden spots. No eyes see them. It is as though they never saw one another. But their drowsy liturgical repetitions answer and answer again, as if from the unfathomable depths of some dim green underworld, worshipping the gods of silence with sounds that give silence itself a richer, a fuller weight.
“There they are!” cried Gladys suddenly, as the figures of the Andersen brothers made themselves visible on the further side of the orchard. ”

“ The brains of mortal men are queer crucibles, and the smouldering fires that heat them are driven by capricious and wanton guests. Lacrima’s old defeat of the owner of Leo’s Hill—a defeat into which there is no need to descend now, for its “terrain” was remote from our present stage—had been a defeat upon what might be called a subliminal or interior plane.
It was almost as if he had encountered her and she had encountered him, not only in the past of this particular life, but a remoter past—in a past of some pre-natal incarnation. ”

“ Luke hung over her thoughtfully and sadly. There is always something sad,—something that seems to bring with it a withering breath from the ultimate futility of the universe,—about a lover’s recognition that the form which formerly thrilled him with ecstasy, now leaves him cold and unmoved. Such sadness, chilly and desolate as the hand of death itself, crept over the stone-carver’s heart, as he looked at the gently-stirring breast and softly-parted lips of his beautiful mistress. ”

“ A village-dweller in Nevilton might, if he were philosophically disposed, be just as much a percipient of this cosmic struggle, as if he stood between the Palatine and St. Peter’s.
Let him linger among the cranes and pulleys of this heathen promontory, and look westward to the shrine of the Holy Grail, or eastward to where rested the Holy Rood, and it would be strange if he did not become conscious of the presence of eternal spiritual antagonists, wrestling for the mastery.
He would at any rate be made aware of the fatal force of Inanimate Objects over human destiny. ”