John Powys - Wood and Stone

When Luke and Gladys left the barn, and hurriedly, under the rising moon, retook their way towards Nevilton, Clavering emerged from his concealment dazed and stupefied. He threw himself down in the darkness on the heap of oats and strove to give form and coherence to the wild flood of thoughts which swept through him.

So this was what he had come out to learn! This was the knowledge that his mad jealousy had driven him to snatch!

He thought of the exquisite sacredness — for him — of that morning’s ritual in the church, and of how easily he had persuaded himself to read into the girl’s preoccupied look something more than natural sadness over Andersen’s death. He had indeed, — only those short hours ago, — allowed himself the sweet illusion that this religious initiation really meant, for his pagan love, some kind of Vita Nuova.

The fates had rattled their dice, however, to a different tune. The unfortunate girl was indeed entering upon a Vita Nuova, but how hideously different a one from that which had been his hope!

On Wednesday came the confirmation service. How could he, — with any respect for his conscience as a guardian of these sacred rites, — permit Gladys to be confirmed now? Yet what ought he to do? Drops of cold sweat stood upon his forehead as he wondered whether it was incumbent upon him to take the first train the following morning for the bishop’s palace and to demand an interview.

No. Tomorrow the prelate would be starting on his episcopal tour. Clavering would have to pursue him from one remote country village to another, and what a pursuit that would be! He recoiled from the idea with sick aversion.

Could he then suppress his fatal knowledge and let the event take place without protest? To act in such a manner would be nothing less than to play the part of an accomplice in the girl’s sin.

Perhaps when the bishop actually appeared he would be able to secure a confidential interview with him and lay the whole matter before him. Or should he act on his own responsibility, and write to Gladys himself, telling her that under the circumstances it would be best for her to stay away from the ceremony?

What reason could he give for such an extraordinary mandate? Could he bluntly indicate to her, in black and white, the secret he had discovered, and the manner of its discovery? To accuse her on the ground of mere village gossip would be to lay himself open to shameful humiliation. Was he, in any case, justified in putting the fatal information, gathered in this way, to so drastic a use? It was only in his madness as a jealous lover that he had possessed himself of this knowledge. As priest of Nevilton he knew nothing.

He had no right to know anything. No; he must pay the penalty of his shameful insanity by bearing this burden in silence, even though his conscience groaned and cracked beneath the weight. Such a silence, with its attendant misery of self-accusation and shame, was all he could offer to his treacherous enchantress as a tacit recompense for having stolen her secret.

He rose and left the granary. As he walked homeward, along the Nevilton road, avoiding by a sort of scrupulous reaction the shorter route followed by the others, it seemed to him as though the night had never been more sultry, or the way more loaded with the presence of impendent calamity.

THE day of James Andersen’s funeral and of Gladys’ confirmation happened to coincide with a remarkable and unexpected event in the life of Mr. Quincunx. Whatever powers, lurking in air or earth, were attempting at that moment to influence the fatal stream of events in Nevilton, must have been grimly conscious of something preordained and inevitable about this eccentric man’s drift towards appalling moral disaster.

It seemed as though nothing on earth now could stop the marriage of Lacrima and Goring, and from the point of view of the moralist, or even of the person of normal decency, such a marriage, if it really did lead to Mr. Quincunx’s pensioning at the hands of his enemy, necessarily held over him a shame and a disgrace proportionate to the outrage done to the girl who loved him. What these evil powers played upon, if evil powers they were, — and not the blind laws of cause and effect, — was the essential character of Mr. Quincunx, which nothing in heaven nor earth seemed able to change.

There are often, however, elements in our fate, which lie, it might seem, deeper than any calculable prediction, deeper, it may be, than the influence of the most powerful supernatural agents, and these elements — unstirred by angel or devil — are sometimes roused to activity by the least expected cause. It is, at these moments, as though Fate, in the incalculable comprehensiveness of her immense designs, condescended to make use of Chance, her elfish sister, to carry out what the natural and normal stream of things would seem to have decreed as an impossibility.

Probably not a living soul who knew him, — certainly not Lacrima, — had the least expectation of any chance of change in Mr. Quincunx. But then none of these persons had really sounded the depths in the soul of the man. There were certain mysterious and unfathomable gulfs in the sea-floor of Mr. Quincunx’s being which would have exhausted all the sorceries of Witch-Bessie even to locate.

So fantastic and surprising are the ways of destiny, that, — as shall be presently seen, — what neither gods nor devils, nor men nor angels, could effect, was effected by nothing more nor less than a travelling circus.

The day of the burying of James and the confirmation of Gladys brought into Nevilton a curious cortège of popular entertainers. This cortège consisted of one of those small wandering circuses, which, during the month of August are wont to leave the towns and move leisurely among the remoter country villages, staying nowhere more than a night, and taking advantage of any local festival or club-meeting to enhance their popularity.

The circus in question, — flamingly entitled Porter’s Universal World-Show, — was owned and conducted by a certain Job Love, a shrewd and avaricious ruffian, who boasted, though with little justification, the inheritance of gipsy blood. As a matter of fact, the authentic gipsy tribes gave Mr. Love an extremely wide berth, avoiding his path as they would have avoided the path of the police. This cautious attitude was not confined, however, to gipsies. Every species of itinerant hawker and pedler avoided the path of Mr. Love, and the few toy-booths and sweet-stalls that followed Ms noisy roundabouts were a department of his own providing.

It was late on Tuesday night when the World-Show established itself in Nevilton Square. The sound of hammers and the barking of dogs was the last thing that the villagers heard before they slept, and the first thing they heard when they awoke.

The master of the World-Show spent the night according to his custom in solitary regal grandeur in the largest of his caravans. The sun had not, however, pierced the white mists in the Nevilton orchards before Mr. Love was up and abroad. The first thing he did, on descending the steps of his caravan, was to wash his hands and face in the basin of the stone fountain. His next proceeding was to measure out into a little metal cup which he produced from his pocket a small quantity of brandy and to pour this refreshment, diluted with water from the fountain, down his capacious throat.

Mr. Love was a lean man, of furtive and irascible appearance. His countenance, bleached by exposure into a species of motley-coloured leather, shone after its immersion in the fountain like the knob of a well-worn cudgel. His whitish hair, cut in convict style close to his head, emphasized the polished mahogany of his visage, from the upper portion of which his sky-blue eyes, small and glittering, shone out defiantly upon the world, like ominous jewels set in the forehead of an obscene and smoke-darkened idol.