John Powys - Wood and Stone

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?”

“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.

The two friends walked up and down the sunny field in front of the house, Luke pouring into the solitary’s attentive ears every one of his recent impressions and sensations.

Mr. Quincunx was evidently profoundly moved by James’ death. He refused Luke’s offer to let him visit the room upstairs, but his refusal was expressed in such a natural and characteristic manner that the stone-carver accepted it in perfect good part.

After a while they sat down together under the shady hedge at the top of the meadow. Here they discoursed and philosophized at large, listening to the sound of the church-bells and watching the slow-moving cattle. It was one of those unruffled Sunday mornings, when, in such places as this, the drowsiness of the sun-warmed leaves and grasses seems endowed with a kind of consecrated calm, the movements of the horses and oxen grow solemn and ritualistic, the languor of the heavy-winged butterflies appears holy, and the stiff sabbatical dresses of the men and women who shuffle so demurely to and fro, seem part of a patient liturgical observance.

Luke loved Mr. Quincunx that morning. The recluse was indeed precisely in his element. Living habitually himself in thoughts of death, pleased — in that incomparable sunshine — to find himself still alive, cynical and yet considerate, mystical and yet humorous, he exactly supplied what the wounded heart of the pagan mourner required for its comfort.

“Idiots! asses! fools!” the stone-carver ejaculated, apostrophizing in his inmost spirit the various persons, clever or otherwise, to whom this nervous and eccentric creature was a mere type of failure and superannuation. None of these others, — not one of them, — not Homer nor Dangelis nor Clavering nor Taxater — could for a moment have entered into the peculiar feelings which oppressed him. As for Gladys or Phyllis or Annie or Polly, — he would have as soon thought of relating his emotions to a row of swallows upon a telegraph-wire as to any of those dainty epitomes of life’s evasiveness!

A man’s brain, a man’s imagination, a man’s scepticism, was what he wanted; but he wanted it touched with just that flavour of fanciful sentiment of which the Nevilton hermit was a master. A hundred quaint little episodes, the import of which none but Mr. Quincunx could have appreciated, were evoked by the stone-carver. Nothing was too blasphemous, nothing too outrageous, nothing too bizarre, for the solitary’s taste. On the other hand, he entered with tender and perfect clairvoyance into the sick misery of loss which remained the background of all Luke’s sensations.

The younger man’s impetuous confidences ebbed and dwindled at last; and with the silence of the church-bells and the receding to the opposite corner of the field of the browsing cattle, a deep and melancholy hush settled upon them both.

Then it was that Mr. Quincunx began speaking of himself and his own anxieties. In the tension of the moment he even went so far as to disclose to Luke, under a promise of absolute secrecy, the sinister story of that contract into which Lacrima had entered with their employer.