John Powys - Wood and Stone

“I’m to dine with him tomorrow,” answered the papal champion, “so I shall have an opportunity of discovering what he’s actually gained by this.”

“I wish I’d had James cremated,” muttered Luke, staring at the fire-place, into which the rain fell down the narrow chimney.

Mr. Taxater crossed himself.

“What do you really feel,” enquired the younger man abruptly, “about the chances in favour of a life after death?”

“The Church,” answered Mr. Taxater, stirring his rum and sugar with a spoon, “could hardly be expected to formulate a dogma denying such a hope. The true spirit of her attitude towards it may perhaps be best understood in the repetition of her requiem prayer, ‘Save us from eternal death!’ We none of us want eternal death, my friend, though many of us are very weary of this particular life. I do not know that I am myself, however. But that may be due to the fact that I am a real sceptic. 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. I doubt doubt.”

Luke rose and poked the fire.

“I’m afraid my little Annie’ll be frightfully wet,” he remarked, “when she gets home tonight. I wish that last train from Yeoborough wasn’t quite so late.”

“Do you propose to go down to the station to meet her?” enquired Mr. Taxater.

Luke sighed. “I suppose so,” he said. “That’s the worst of being married. There’s always something or other interfering with the main purpose of life.”

“May I ask what the main purpose of life may be?” said the theologian.

“Talking with you, of course,” replied the young man smiling; “talking with any friend. Oh damn! I can’t tell you how I miss going up to Dead Man’s Cottage.”

“Yes,” said the great scholar meditatively, “women are bewitching creatures, especially when they’re very young or very old, but they aren’t exactly arresting in conversation.”

Luke became silent, meditating on this.

“They throw out little things now and then,” he said. “Annie does. But they’ve no sense of proportion. If they’re happy they’re thrilled by everything, and if they’re unhappy, — well, you know how it is! They don’t bite at the truth, for the sake of biting, and they never get to the bone. They just lick the gloss of things with the tips of their tongues. And they quiver and vibrate so, you never know where they are, or what they’ve got up their sleeve that tickles them.”

Mr. Taxater lifted his glass to his mouth and carefully replaced it on the table. There was something in this movement of his plump white fingers which always fascinated Luke. Mr. Taxater’s hands looked as though, beyond the pen and the wine-cup, they never touched any earthly object.

“Have you heard any more of Philip Wone?” enquired the stone-carver.

The theologian shook his head. “I’m afraid, since he went up to London, he’s really got entangled in these anarchist plots.”

“I’m not unselfish enough to be an anarchist,” said Luke, “but I sympathize with their spirit. The sort of people I can’t stand are these Christian Socialists. What really pleases me, I suppose, is the notion of a genuine aristocracy, an aristocracy as revolutionary as anarchists in their attitude to morals and such things, an aristocracy that’s flung up out of this mad world, as a sort of exquisite flower of chance and accident, an aristocracy that is worth all this damned confusion!”

Mr. Taxater smiled. It always amused him when Luke Andersen got excited in this way, and began catching his breath and gesticulating. He seemed to have heard these remarks on other occasions. He regarded them as a signal that the stone-carver had drunk more whiskey than was good for him. When completely himself Luke talked of girls and of death. When a little depressed he abused either Nonconformists or Socialists. When in the early stages of intoxication he eulogized the upper classes.

“It’s a pity,” said the theologian, “that Ninsy couldn’t bring herself to marry that boy. There’s something morbid in the way she talks. I met her in Nevil’s Gully yesterday, and I had quite a long conversation with her.”

Luke looked sharply at him. “Have you yourself ever seen her, across there?” he asked making a gesture in the direction of the churchyard.

Mr. Taxater shook his head. “Have you?” he demanded.

Luke nodded.

A sudden silence fell upon them. The rain beat in redoubled fury upon the window, and they could hear it pattering on the roof and falling in a heavy stream from the pipe above the eaves.

The younger man felt as though some tragic intimation, uttered in a tongue completely beyond the reach of both of them, were beating about for entry, at closed shutters.

Mr. Taxater felt no sensation of this kind. “ Non est reluctandum cum Deo ” were the sage words with which he raise his glass to his lips.

Luke remained motionless staring at the window, and thinking of a certain shrouded figure, with hollow cheeks and crossed hands, to whom this rain was nothing, and less than nothing.

Once more there was silence between them, as though a flock of noiseless night-birds were flying over the house, on their way to the far-off sea.

“How is Mrs. Seldom getting on?” enquired Luke, pushing back his chair. “Is Vennie allowed to write to her from that place?”

The theologian smiled. “Oh, the dear lady is perfectly happy! In fact, I think she’s really happier than when she was worrying herself about Vennie’s future.”

“I don’t like these convents,” remarked Luke.

“Few people like them,” said the papal champion, “who have never entered them.

“I’ve never seen an unhappy nun. They are almost too happy. They are like children. Perhaps they’re the only persons in existence who know what continual, as opposed to spasmodic, happiness means. The happiness of sanctity is a secret that has to be concealed from the world, just as the happiness of certain very vicious people has, — for fear there should be no more marriages.”

“Talking of marriages,” remarked Luke, “I’d give anything to know how our friend Gladys is getting on with Clavering. I expect his attitude of heroic pity has worn a little thin by this time. I wonder how soon the more earthly side of the shield will wear thin too! But — poor dear girl! — I do feel sorry for her. Fancy having to listen to the Reverend Hugh’s conversation by night and by day!

“I sent her a picture post-card, the other afternoon, from Yeoborough — a comic one. I wonder if she snapped it up, and hid it, before her husband came down to breakfast!”

The jeering tone of the man jarred a little on Mr. Taxater’s nerves.

“I think I understand,” he thought to himself, “why it is that he praises the aristocracy.”

To change the conversation, he reverted to Miss Seldom’s novitiate.

“Vennie was very indignant with me for remaining so long in London, but I am glad now that I did. None of our little arrangements — eh, my friend? — would have worked out so well as her Napoleonic directness. That shows how wise it is to stand aside sometimes and let things take their course.”

“Romer doesn’t stand aside,” laughed Luke. “I’d give a year of my life to know what he felt when Dangelis carried those people away! But I suppose we shall never know.