John Powys - Wood and Stone

Luke gazed at her blankly, thankful that the weight of weary foreknowledge upon his face was concealed from her by the growing darkness.

“I want to say to you, my dear love,” the girl went on, her bosom rising and falling in pitiful embarrassment, and her white fingers nervously scooping up handful after handful of the shadowy grain.

“I want to say to you something that is — that is very serious — for us both, Luke, — I want to tell you,—”

Her voice once more died away, in the same inarticulate and curious gurgle, like the sob of water running under a weir.

Luke rose to his feet and stood in front of her. “It’s all right,” he said calmly. “You needn’t agitate yourself. I understand.”

The girl covered her face with her hands. “But what shall I do? What shall I do?” she sobbed. “I can’t marry Ralph like this. He’ll kill me when he finds out. I’m so afraid of him, Luke — you don’t know, — you don’t know,—”

“He’ll forgive you,” answered the stone-carver quietly. “He’s not a person to burst out like that. Lots of people have to confess these little things after they’re married. Some men aren’t half so particular as you girls think.”

Gladys raised her head and gave her friend a long queer look, the full import of which was concealed from him in the darkness. She made a futile little groping movement with her hand.

“Luke,” she whispered, “I must just say this to you even if it makes you angry. I shouldn’t be happy afterwards — whatever happens — if I didn’t say it. I want you to know that I’m ready, if you wish, if — if you love me enough for that, Luke, — to go away with you anywhere! I feel it isn’t as it used to be. I feel everything’s different. But I want you to know, — to know without any mistake — that I’d go at once — willingly — wherever you took me!

“It’s not that I’m begging you to marry me,” she wailed, “it’s only that I love you, love you and want you so frightfully, my darling!

“I wouldn’t worry you, Luke,” she added, in a low, pitiful little voice, that seemed to emerge rather from the general shadowiness of the place than from a human being’s lips, “I wouldn’t tease you, or scold you when you enjoyed yourself! It’s only that I want to be with you, that I want to be near you. I never thought it would come to this. I thought —” Her voice died away again into the darkness.

Luke began pacing up and down the floor of the barn.

Once more she spoke. “I’d be faithful to you, Luke, married or unmmarried, — and I’d work, though I know you won’t believe that. But I can do quite hard work, when I like!”

By some malignity of chance, or perhaps by a natural reaction from her pleading words, Luke’s mind reverted to her tone and temper on that June morning when she insulted him by a present of money.

“No, Gladys,” he said. “It won’t do. You and I weren’t made for each other. There are certain things — many things — in me that you’ll never understand, and I daresay there are things in you that I never shall. We’re not made for one another, child, I tell you. We shouldn’t be happy for a week. I know myself, and I know you, and I’m sure it wouldn’t do.

“Don’t you fret yourself about Dangelis. If he finds out, he finds out — and that’s the end of it. But I swear to you that I know him well enough to know that you’ve nothing to be afraid of — even if he does find out. He’s not the kind of man to make a fuss. I can see exactly the way he’d take it. He’d be sorry for you and laugh at himself, and plunge desperately into his painting.

“I like Dangelis, I tell you frankly. I think he’s a thoroughly generous and large-minded fellow. Of course I’ve hardly seen him to speak to, but you can’t be mistaken about a man like that. At least I can’t! I seem to know him in and out, up hill and down dale.

“Make a fuss? Not he! He’ll make this country ring and ting with the fame of his pictures. That’s what he’ll do! And as for being horrid to you — not he! I know him better than that. He’ll be too much in love with you, too, — you little demon! That’s another point to bear in mind.

“Oh, you’ll have the whip-hand of him, never fear, — and our son, — I hope it is a son my dear! — will be treated as if it were his own.

“I know him, I tell you! He’s a thoroughly decent fellow, though a bit of a fool, no doubt. But we’re all that!

“Don’t you be a little goose, Gladys, and get fussed up and worried over nothing. After all, what does it matter? Life’s such a mad affair anyway! All we can do is to map things to the best of our ability, and then chance it.

“We’re all on the verge of a precipice. Do you think I don’t realize that? But that’s no reason why we should rush blindly up to the thing, and throw ourselves over. And it would be nothing else than that, nothing else than sheer madness, for you and I to go off together.

“Do you think your father would give us a penny? Not he! I detect in your father, Gladys, an extraordinary vein of obstinacy. You haven’t clashed up against it yet, but try and play any of these games on him, and you’ll see!

“No; one thing you may be perfectly sure of, and that is, that whatever he finds out, Dangelis will never breathe a word to your father. He’s madly in love with you, girl, I tell you; and if I’m out of the way, you’ll be able to do just what you like with him!”

It was completely dark now, and when Luke’s oration came to an end there was no sound in the barn except a low sobbing.

“Come on, child; we must be getting home, or you’ll be frightfully late. Here! give me your hand. Where are you?”

He groped about in the darkness until his sleeve brushed against her shoulder. It was trembling under her efforts to suppress her sobs.

He got hold of her wrists and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, my dear,” he repeated, “we must get out of this-now. Give me one nice kiss before we go.”

She permitted herself to be caressed — passive and unresisting in his arms.

In the darkness they touched the outer edge of Mr. Clavering’s hiding-place, and the girl, swaying a little backwards under Luke’s endearments, felt the pressure of the hay-wall behind her. She did not, however, feel the impassioned touch of the choking kiss which the poor imprisoned priest desperately imprinted on a loose tress of her hair.

It was one of those pitiful and grotesque situations which seem sometimes to arise, — as our fantastic planet turns on its orbit, — for no other purpose than that of gratifying some malign vein of goblin-like irony in the system of things.

That at the moment when Luke, under the spell of the shadowy fragrance of the place, and the pliant submissiveness of the girl’s form, threw something of his old ardour into his kiss, her other, more desperate love should have dared such an approach, was a coincidence apparently of the very kind to appeal to the perverse taste of this planetary humour.

The actual result of such a strange consentaneousness of rival emotion was that the three human heads remained for a brief dramatic moment in close juxtaposition, — the two fair ones and the dark one so near one another, that it might have seemed almost inevitable that their thoughts should interact in that fatal proximity.

The pitiful pathos of the whole human comedy might well have been brought home to any curious observer able to pierce that twilight! Such an observer would have felt towards those three poor obsessed craniums the same sort of tenderness that they themselves would have been conscious of, had they suddenly come across a sleeping person or a dead body.

Strange, that the ultimate pity in these things, — in this blind antagonistic striving of human desires under such gracious flesh and blood — should only arouse these tolerant emotions when they are no longer of any avail! Had some impossible bolt from heaven stricken these three impassioned ones in their tragic approximation, how, — long afterwards, — the discoverer of the three skeletons would have moralized upon their fate! As it was, there was nothing but the irony of the gods to read what the irony of the gods was writing upon that moment’s drowning sands.