John Powys - Wood and Stone

The wind had fallen, and the silence about the place was as oppressive to Lacrima’s mind as the shadow of some colossal raven’s wing.

The door which separated their chambers was ajar, and Gladys, her yellow hair loose upon her shoulders, had flung herself negligently down in a deep wicker-chair at the side of her companion’s bed.

The luckless Pariah, her brown curls tied back from her pale forehead by a dark ribbon, was lying supine upon her pillows with a look of troubled terror in her wide-open eyes. One long thin arm lay upon the coverlet, the fingers tightened upon an open book.

At the beginning of her “visit” to Nevilton House she had clung desperately to these precious night-hours, when the great establishment was asleep; and she had even been so audacious as to draw the bolt of the door which separated her from her cousin. But that wilful young tyrant had pretended to her mother that she often “got frightened” in the night, so orders had gone out that the offending bolt should be removed.

After this, Gladys had her associate quite at her mercy, and the occasions were rare when the pleasure of being allowed to read herself to sleep was permitted to the younger girl.

It was curiously irritating to the yellow-haired despot to observe the pleasure which Lacrima derived from these solitary readings. Gladys got into the habit of chattering on, far into the night, so as to make sure that, when she did retire, her cousin would be too weary to do anything but fall asleep.

As the two girls lay thus side by side, the one in her chair, and the other in her bed, under the weight of the night’s sombre expectancy, the contrast between them was emphasized to a fine dramatic point. The large-winged bat that fluttered every now and then across the window might have caught, if for a brief moment it could have been endowed with human vision, a strange sense of the tragic power of one human being over another, when the restriction of a common roof compels their propinquity.

One sometimes seeks to delude oneself in the fond belief that our European domestic hearths are places of peace and freedom, compared with the dark haunts of savagery in remoter lands. It is not true! The long-evolved system that, with us, groups together, under one common authority, beings as widely sundered as the poles, is a system that, for all its external charm, conceals, more often than anyone could suppose, subtle and gloomy secrets, as dark and heathen as any in those less favoured spots.

The nervous organization of many frail human animals is such that the mere fact of being compelled, out of custom and usage and economic helplessness, to live in close relation with others, is itself a tragic purgatory.

It is often airily assumed that the obstinate and terrible struggles of life are encountered abroad — far from home — in desolate contention with the elements or with enemies. It is not so! The most obstinate and desperate struggles of all — struggles for the preservation of one’s most sacred identity, of one’s inmost liberty of action and feeling — take place, and have their advances and retreats, their treacheries and their betrayals, under the hypocritical calm of the domestic roof. Those who passionately resent any agitation, any free thought, any legislative interference, which might cause these fortresses of seclusion to enlarge their boundaries, forget, in their poetic idealization of the Gods of the Hearth, that tragedies are often enacted under that fair consecration which would dim the sinister repute of Argos or of Thebes. The Platonic speculations which, all through human history, have erected their fanciful protests against these perils, may often be unscientific and ill-considered. But there is a smouldering passion of heroic revolt behind such dreams, which it is not always wise to overlook.

As these two girls, the fair-haired and the dark-haired, let the solemn burden of the night thus press unheeded upon them, there would have needed no fantastic imagination, in an invisible observer, to be aware of the tense vibration between them of some formidable spiritual encounter.

High up above the mass of Leonian stone which we have named Nevilton House, the Milky Way trailed its mystery of far-off brightness across the incredible gulfs. What to it was the fact that one human heart should tremble like a captured bird in the remorseless power of another?

It was not to this indifferent sky, stretched equally over all, that hands could be lifted. And yet the scene between the girls must have appeared, to such an invisible watcher, as linked to a dramatic contest above and beyond their immediate human personalities.

In this quiet room the “Two Mythologies” were grappling; each drawing its strength from forces of an origin as baffling to reason as the very immensity of those spaces above, so indifferent to both!

The hatred that Gladys bore to Lacrima’s enjoyment of her midnight readings was a characteristic indication of the relations between the girls. It is always infuriating to a well-constituted nature to observe these little pathetic devices of pleasure in a person who has no firm grip upon life. It excites the same healthy annoyance as when one sees some absurd animal that ought, properly speaking, not to be alive at all, deriving ridiculous satisfaction from some fantastic movement incredible to sound senses.

The Pariah had, as a matter of fact, defeated her healthy-minded cousin by using one of those sly tricks which Pariahs alone indulge in; and had craftily acquired the habit of slipping away earlier to her room, and snatching little oases of solitary happiness before the imperious young woman came upstairs. It was in revenge for these evasions that Gladys was even now announcing to her companion a new and calculated outrage upon her slave’s peace of mind.

Every Pariah has some especial and peculiar dread, — some nervous mania. Lacrima had several innate terrors. The strongest of all was a shuddering dread of the supernatural. Next to this, what she most feared was the idea of deep cold water. Lakes, rivers, and chilly inland streams, always rather alarmed than inspired her. The thought of mill-ponds, as they eddied and gurgled in the darkness, often came to her as a supreme fear, and the image of indrawn dark waters, sucked down beneath weirs and dams, was a thing she could not contemplate without trembling. It was no doubt the Genoese blood in her, crying aloud for the warm blue waves of the Mediterranean and shrinking from the chill of our English ditches, that accounted for this peculiarity. The poor child had done her best to conceal her feeling, but Gladys, alert as all healthy minded people are, to seize upon the silly terrors of the ill-constituted, had not let it pass unobserved, and was now serenely prepared to make good use of it, as a heaven-sent opportunity for revenge.

It must be noted, that in the centre of the north garden of Nevilton House, surrounded by cypress-bordered lawns and encircled by a low hedge of carefully clipped rosemary, was a deep round pond.

This pond, built entirely of Leonian stone, lent itself to the playing of a splendid fountain — a fountain which projected from an ornamental island, covered with overhanging ferns.

The fountain only played on state occasions, and the coolness and depth of the water, combined with the fact that the pond had a stone bottom, gave the place admirable possibilities for bathing. Gladys herself, full of animal courage and buoyant energy, had made a custom during the recent hot weather of rising from her bed early in the morning, before the servants were up, and enjoying a matutinal plunge.

She was a practised swimmer and had been lately learning to dive; and the sensation of slipping out of the silent house, garbed in a bathing-dress, with sandals on her feet, and an opera-cloak over her shoulders, was thrilling to every nerve of her healthy young body. Impervious animal as she was, she would hardly have been human if those dew-drenched lawns and exquisite morning odours had not at least crossed the margin of her consciousness. She had hitherto been satisfied with a proud sense of superiority over her timid companion, and Lacrima so far, had been undisturbed by these excursions, except in the welcoming of her cousin on her return, dripping and laughing, and full of whimsical stories of how she had peeped down over the terrace-wall, and seen the milk-men, in the field below, driving in their cattle.