John Powys - Wood and Stone

She moved past him, up the path, and seated herself upon the edge of the wheel-barrow.

“You can go on with your weeding,” she said, “I can talk to you while you work.”

“Of course,” murmured Mr. Quincunx, making no effort to resume his labour, “you naturally find a handsome fellow like that, a more pleasant companion than me. I don’t blame you. I understand it very well.”

Lacrima impatiently took up a handful of groundsel and spurge from the dusty heap by her side and flung them into the path.

“You make me quite angry with you, Maurice,” she cried. “How can you say such things after all that has happened between us?”

“That’s the way,” jeered the man bitterly, plucking at his beard. “That’s the way! Go on abusing me because you are not living at your full pleasure, like a stall-fed upper-class lady!”

“I shan’t stay with you another moment,” cried Lacrima, with tears in her eyes, “if you are so unkind.”

As soon as he had reduced her to this point, Mr. Quincunx instantaneously became gentle and tender. This is one of the profoundest laws of a Pariah’s being. He resents it when his companion in helplessness shows a spirit beyond his own, but directly such a one has been driven into reciprocal wretchedness, his own equanimity is automatically regained.

After only the briefest glance at the gate, he put his arms round the girl and kissed her affectionately. She returned his embrace with interest, disarranging as she did so the cabbage-leaf in his hat, and causing it to flutter down upon the path. They leant together for a while in silence, against the edge of the wheel-barrow, their hands joined.

Thus associated they would have appeared, to the dreaded passer-by, in the light of a pair of extremely sentimental lovers, whose passion had passed into the stage of delicious melancholia. The wind whirled the dust in little eddies around them and the sun beat down upon their heads.

“You must be kind to me when I come to tell you how unhappy I am,” said the Italian. “You are the only real friend I have in the world.”

It is sad to have to relate that these tender words brought a certain thrill of alarm into the heart of Mr. Quincunx. He felt a sudden apprehension lest she might indicate that it was his duty to run away with her, and face the world in remote regions.

No one but a born Pariah could have endured the confiding clasp of that little hand and the memory of so ardent a kiss without being roused to an impetuosity of passion ready to dare anything to make her its own.

Instead of pursuing any further the question of his friend’s troubles, Mr. Quincunx brought the conversation round to his own.

“The worst that could happen to me has happened,” he said, and he told her of his interview with the Romers the day before. The girl flushed with anger.

“But this is abominable!” she cried, “simply abominable! You’d better go at once and talk it over with Mrs. Seldom. Surely, surely, something can be done! It is clear they have robbed you of your money. It is a disgraceful thing! Santa Maria — what a country this is!”

“It is no use,” sighed the man helplessly. “Mrs. Seldom can’t help me. She is poor enough herself. And she will know as well as I do that in the matter of law I am entirely in their hands. My aunt had absolute confidence in Mr. Romer and no confidence in me. No doubt she arranged it with them that they were to dole me out the money like a charity. Mr. Romer did once talk about my lending it to him, and his paying interest on it, and so forth; but he managed all my aunt’s affairs, and I don’t know what arrangement he made with her. My aunt never liked me really. I think if she were alive now she would probably support them in what they are doing. She would certainly say, — she always used to say — that it would do me good to do a little honest work.” He pronounced the words “honest work” with concentrated bitterness.

“Probably,” he went on, “Mrs. Seldom would say the same. I know I should be extremely unwilling to try and make her see how horrible to me the idea of work of this kind is. She would never understand. She would think it was only that I wanted to remain a “gentleman” and not to lose caste. She would probably tell me that a great many gentlemen have worked in offices before now. I daresay they have, and I hope they enjoyed it! I know what these gentlemen-workers are, and how easy things are made for them. They won’t be made easy for me. I can tell you that, Lacrima!”

The girl drew a deep sigh, and walked slowly a few paces down the path, meditating, with her hands behind her. Presently she turned.

“Perhaps after all,” she said, “it won’t be as bad as you fancy. I know the head-clerk in Mr. Romer’s Yeoborough office and he is quite a nice man — altogether different from that Lickwit.”

Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard with a trembling hand. “Of course I knew you’d say that, Lacrima. You are just like the rest. You women all think, at the bottom of your hearts, that men are no good if they can’t make money. I believe you have an idea that I ought to do what people call ‘get on a bit in the world.’ If you think that, it only shows how little you understand me. I have no intention of ‘getting on.’ I won’t ‘get on’! I would sooner walk into Auber Lake and end the whole business!”

The suddenness and injustice of this attack really did rouse the Italian to anger. “Good-bye,” she said with a dark flash in her eyes. “I see its no use talking to you when you are in this mood. You have never, never spoken to me in that tone before. Good-bye! I can open the gate for myself, thank you.”

She walked away from him and passed out into the lane. He stood watching her with a queer haggard look on his face, his sorrowful grey eyes staring in front of him, as if in the presence of an apparition. Then, very slowly, he resumed his work, leaving however the fallen cabbage-leaf unnoticed on the ground.

The weeds in the wheel-barrow, the straight banked-up lines of potatoes and lettuces, wore, as he returned to them, that curious air of forlorn desertion which is one of nature’s bitterest commentaries upon the folly of such scenes.

A sickening sense of emptiness took possession of him, and in a moment or two became unendurable. He flung a handful of weeds to the ground and ran impetuously to the gate and out into the lane. It was too late. A group of farm-labourers laughing and shouting, and driving before them a herd of black pigs, blocked up the road. He could not bring himself to pass them, thus hatless and in his shirt-sleeves. Besides, they must have seen the girl, and they would know he was pursuing her.

He returned slowly up the path to his house, and — to avoid being seen by the men — entered his kitchen, and sat gloomily down upon a chair. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked with contemptuous unconcern. The room had that smell of mortuary dust which rooms in small houses often acquire in the summer. He sat down once more on a chair, his hands upon his knees, and stared vacantly in front of him. A thrush outside the window was cracking a snail upon a stone. When the shouts of the men died away, this was the only sound that came to him, except the continual “tick — tick — tick — tick” of the clock, which seemed to be occupied in driving nails into the heavy coffin-lid of every mortal joy that time had ever brought forth.

That same night in Nevilton House was a night of wretched hours for Lacrima, but of hours of a wretchedness more active than that which made the hermit of Dead Man’s Cottage pull the clothes over his head and turn his face to the wall, long ere the twilight had vanished from his garden.

On leaving her friend thus abruptly, her heart full of angry revolt, Lacrima had seen the crowd of men and animals approaching, and to escape them had scrambled into a field on the border of the road. Following a little path which led across it, and crossing two more meadows, she flung herself down under the shadow of some great elms, in a sort of grassy hollow beneath an over-grown hedge, and gave full vent to her grief. The hollow in which she hid herself was a secluded and lonely spot, and no sound reached her but the monotonous summer-murmur of the flies and the rustle of the wind-troubled branches. Lying thus, prone on her face, her broad-brimmed hat with its poppy-trimmings thrown down at her side, and her limbs trembling with the violence of her sobs, Lacrima seemed to insert into that alien landscape an element of passionate feeling quite foreign to its sluggish fertility. Not alien to the spot, however, was another human form, that at the same hour had been led to wander among those lush meadows.