John Powys - Wood and Stone

With a countenance convulsed with helpless fury he watched the girl walk slowly and timidly up to Luke’s side, and saw the stone-carver recognize her and rise to greet her. He could not catch their words, though he strained his ears to do so, but their gestures and attitudes were quite distinguishable.

It was, indeed, little wonder that the agitated priest could not overhear what Gladys said, for the extreme nervousness under which she laboured made her first utterances so broken and low that even her interlocutor could scarcely follow them.

She laid a pleading hand on Luke’s arm. “I was unhappy,” she murmured, “I was unhappy, and I wanted to tell you. I’ve been thinking about you all day. I heard of his death quite early in the morning. Luke, — you’re not angry with me any more, are you? I’d have done anything that this shouldn’t have happened!”

Luke looked at her searchingly, but made, at the same time, an impatient movement of his arm, so that the hand she had placed upon his sleeve fell to her side.

“Let’s get away from here, Luke,” she implored; “anywhere, — across the fields, — I told them at home I might go for a walk after church. It’ll be all right. No one will know.”

“Across the fields — eh?” replied the stone-carver. “Well — I don’t mind. What do you say to a walk to Rogerstown? I haven’t been there since I went with James, and there’ll be a moon to get home by.” He looked at her intently, with a certain bitter humour lurking in the curve of his lips.

Under ordinary circumstances it was with the utmost difficulty that Gladys could be persuaded to walk anywhere. Her lethargic nature detested that kind of exercise. He was amazed at the alacrity with which she accepted the offer.

Her eyes quite lit up. “I’d love that, Luke, I’d simply love it!” she cried eagerly. “Let’s start! I’ll walk as fast as you like — and I don’t care how late we are!”

They moved out of the churchyard together, by the gate opening on the green.

Luke was interested, but not in the least touched, by the girl’s chastened and submissive manner. His suggestion about Rogerstown was really more of a sort of test than anything else, to see just how far this clinging passivity of hers would really go.

As they followed the lane leading out of one of the side-alleys of the village towards the Roman Road, the stone-carver could not help indulging in a certain amount of silent psychological analysis in regard to this change of heart in his fair mistress. He seemed to get a vision of the great world-passions, sweeping at random through the universe, and bending the most obsinate wills to their caprice.

On the one hand, he thought, there is that absurd Mr. Clavering, — simple, pure-minded, a veritable monk of God, — driven almost insane with Desire, and on the other, here is Gladys, — naturally as selfish and frivolous a young pagan as one could wish to amuse oneself with, — driven almost insane with self-oblivious love! They were like earthquakes and avalanches, like whirlpools and water-spouts, he thought, these great world-passions! They could overwhelm all the good in one person, and all the evil in another, with the same sublime indifference, and in themselves — remain non-moral, superhuman, elemental!

In the light of this vision, Luke could not resist a hurried mental survey of the various figures in his personal drama. He wondered how far his own love for James could be said to belong to this formidable category. No! He supposed that both he and Mr. Quincunx were too self-possessed, or too epicurean, ever to be thus swept out of their path. His brother was clearly a victim of these erotic Valkyries, so was Ninsy Lintot, and in a lesser degree, he shrewdly surmised, young Philip Wone. He himself, he supposed, was, in these things, amourous and vicious rather than passionate. So he had always imagined Gladys to have been. But Gladys had been as completely swept out of the shallows of her viciousness, by this overpowering obsession, as Mr. Clavering had been swept out of the shallows of his puritanism, by the same power. If that fantastic theory of Vennie Seldom’s about the age-long struggle between the two Hills — between the stone of the one and the wood of the other — had any germ of truth in it, it was clear that these elemental passions belonged to a region of activity remote from either, and as indifferent to both, as the great zodiacal signs were indifferent to the solar planets.

Luke had just arrived at this philosophical, or, if the reader pleases, mystical conclusion, when they emerged upon the Roman Road.

Ascending an abrupt hill, the last eminence between Hullaway and far-distant ranges, they found themselves looking down over an immense melancholy plain, in the centre of which, on the banks of a muddy river, stood the ancient Roman stronghold of Rogerstown, the birth-place, so Luke always loved to remind himself, of the famous monkish scientist Roger Bacon.

The sun had already disappeared, and the dark line of the Mendip Hills on the northern horizon were wrapped in a thick, purple haze.

The plain they looked down upon was cut into two equal segments by the straight white road they were to follow, — if Luke was serious in his intention, — and all along the edges of the road, and spreading in transverse lines across the level fields, were deep, reedy ditches, bordered in places by pollard willows.

The whole plain, subject, in autumn and winter, to devastating floods, was really a sort of inlet or estuary of the great Somersetshire marshes, lying further west, which are collectively known as Sedgemoor.

Gladys could not refrain from giving vent to a slight movement of instinctive reluctance, when she saw how close the night was upon them, and how long the road seemed, but she submissively suppressed any word of protest, when, with a silent touch upon her arm, her companion led her forward, down the shadowy incline.

Their figures were still visible — two dark isolated forms upon the pale roadway — when, hot and panting, Mr. Clavering arrived at the same hill-top. With a sigh of profound relief he recognized that he had not lost his fugitives. The only question was, where were they going, and for what purpose? He remained for several minutes gloomy and watchful at his post of observation.

They were now nearly half a mile across the plain, and their receding figures had already begun to grow indistinct in the twilight, when Mr. Clavering saw them suddenly leave the road and debouch to the left. “Ah!” he muttered to himself, “They’re going home by Hullaway Chase!”

This Hullaway Chase was a rough tract of pasturage a little to the east of the level flats, and raised slightly above them. From its southern extremity a long narrow lane, skirting the outlying cottages of the village, led straight across the intervening uplands to Nevilton Park. It was clearly towards this lane, by a not much frequented foot-path over the ditches, that Gladys and Luke were proceeding.

To anyone as well acquainted as Clavering was with the general outline of the country the route that the lovers — or whatever their curious relation justifies us in calling them — must needs take, to return to Nevilton, was now as clearly marked as if it were indicated on a map.

“Curse him!” muttered the priest, “I hope he’s not going to drown her in those brooks!”

He let his gaze wander across the level expanse at his feet. How could he get close to them, he wondered, so as to catch even a stray sentence or two of what they were saying.

His passion had reached such a point of insanity that he longed to be transformed into one of those dark-winged rooks that now in a thin melancholy line were flying over their heads, so that he might swoop down above them and follow them — follow them — every step of the way! He was like a man drawn to the edge of a precipice and magnetized by the very danger of the abyss. To be near them, to listen to what they said, — the craving for that possessed him with a fixed and obstinate hunger!