Wood and Stone (46 page)

“I think your side will win in the country
generally
,” he remarked. “As to this district, I cannot tell. Mr. Romer has strengthened himself
considerably
by his action after the strike.”

The candidate placed a carefully selected piece of fruit in his mouth, and called to his little boy, who was scratching his initials with a knife upon the base of the tower.

“He will be beaten all the same,” he said. “He is bound to be beaten. The stars in their courses must fight against a man like that. I feel it in the air; in the earth; in these beautiful trees. I feel it everywhere. He has challenged stronger powers than you or me. He has challenged the majesty of God Himself. I’ll give you the right”—he went on in a voice that mechanically assumed a preacher’s tone—“to call me a liar and a false prophet, if by this time, in ten days, the oppressor of the poor does not find himself crushed and beaten!”

“I am afraid right and wrong are more strangely mixed in this world than all that, Mr. Wone,” Vennie found herself saying, with a little weary glance over the wide sun-bathed valleys extended at their feet.

“Pardon me, pardon me, young lady,” cried the Candidate. “In this great cause there can be no
doubt, no question, no ambiguity. The evolution of the human race has reached a point when the will of God must reveal itself in the triumph of love and liberty. Nothing else matters. All turns upon this. That is why I feel that my campaign is more than a political struggle. It is a religious struggle, and on our side are the great moral forces that uphold the world!”

Vennie’s exhausted nerves completely broke down upon this.

“Shall we go?” she said, touching her companion on the sleeve.

Clavering nodded, and bade the melon-eater “good afternoon,” with a brusque gesture.

As they went off, he turned on his heel. “The will of God, Mr. Wone, is only to be found in the obedient reception of His sacraments.”

The Christian candidate opened his mouth with amazement. “Those young people,” he thought to himself, “are up to no good. They’ll end by
becoming
papists, if they go on like this. Its extraordinary that the human mind should actually
prefer
slavery to freedom!”

Meanwhile the man whose mysterious evasion of his pursuers had resulted in this disconcerting
encounter
was already well-advanced on his way towards the Wild Pine ridge. He had, as a matter of fact, crossed the field between the west drive and the Vicarage-garden, and skirting the orchards below Nevilton House, had plunged into the park.

A vague hope of meeting Lacrima—an instinctive rather than a conscious feeling—had led him in this direction. Once in the park, the high opposing ridge,
crowned with its sentinel-line of tall Scotch-firs, arrested his attention and drew him towards it. He crossed the Yeoborough road and ascended the incline of Dead Man’s Lane.

As he passed the cottage of his rival, he observed Mr. Quincunx energetically at work in his garden. On this occasion the recluse was digging up, not weeds, but young potatoes. He was in his shirt-sleeves and looked hot and tired.

Andersen leaned upon the little gate and observed him with curious interest. “Why isn’t she here?” he muttered to himself. Then, after a pause: “He is an ash-root. Let him drag that house down! Why doesn’t he drag it down, with all its heavy stones? And the Priory too? And the Church;—yes; and the Church too! He burrows like a root. He looks like a root. I must tell him all these things. I must tell him why he has been chosen, and I have been rejected!” He opened the gate forthwith and advanced towards the potato-digger.

Mr. Quincunx might have struck the imagination of a much less troubled spirit than that of the poor stone-carver as having a resemblance to a root. His form was at once knotted and lean, fibrous and delicate. His face, by reason of his stooping position, was suffused with a rich reddish tint, and his beard was dusty and unkempt. He rose hastily, on
observing
his visitor.

“People like you and me, James, are best by
ourselves
at these holiday-times,” was his inhospitable greeting. “You can help me with my potatoes if you like. Or you can tell me your news as I work. Or do you want to ask me any question?”

He uttered these final words in such a tone as the Delphic oracle might have used, when addressing some harassed refugee.

“Has
she
been up here today?” said the
stone-carver
.

“I like the way you talk,” replied the other. “Why should we mention their names? When I say people, I mean girls. When I say persons, I mean girls. When I say young ladies, I mean girls. And when you say ‘she’ you mean our girl.”

“Yours!” cried the demented man; “she is yours—not ours. She is weighed down by this evil Stone,—weighed down into the deep clay. What has she to do with me, who have worked at the thing so long?”

Mr. Quincunx leant upon his hoe and surveyed the speaker. It occurred to him at once that something was amiss. “Good Lord!” he thought to himself, “the fellow has been drinking. I must get him out of this garden as quickly as possible.”

“She loves you,” Andersen went on, “because you are like a root. You go deep into the earth and no stone can resist you. You twine and twine and twine, and pull them all down. They are all haunted places, these houses and churches; all haunted and evil! They make a man’s head ache to live in them. They put voices into a man’s ears. They are as full of voices as the sea is full of waves.”

“You are right there, my friend,” replied Mr. Quincunx. “It’s only what I’ve always said. Until people give up building great houses and great churches, no one will ever be happy. We ought to live in bushes and thickets, or in tents. My cottage is no better than a bush. I creep into it at night,
and out again in the morning. If its thatch fell on my head I should hardly feel it.”

“You wouldn’t feel it, you wouldn’t!” cried the stone-carver. “And the reason of that is, that you can burrow like a root. I shouldn’t feel it either, but for a different reason.”

“I expect you’d better continue your walk,”
remarked
Mr. Quincunx. “I never fuss myself about people who come to see me. If they come, they come. And when they go, they go.”

The stone-carver sighed and looked round him. The sun gleamed graciously upon the warm earth, danced and sparkled upon the windows of the cottage, and made the beads of sweat on Mr. Quincunx’s brow shine like diamonds.

“Do you think,” he said, while the potato-digger turned to his occupation, “that happiness or
unhappiness
predominates in this world?”

“Unhappiness!” cried the bearded man, glaring at his acquaintance with the scowl of a goblin. “
Unhappiness
! Unhappiness! Unhappiness! That is why the only wise way to live is to avoid everything. That’s what I always do. I avoid people, I avoid possessions, I avoid quarrels, I avoid lust, and I avoid love! My life consists in the art of avoiding things.”

“She doesn’t want happiness,” pleaded the obsessed stone-carver. “And
her
love is enough. She only wants to escape.”

“Why do you keep bringing Lacrima in?” cried the recluse. “She is going to marry John Goring. She is going to be mistress of the Priory.”

A convulsive shock of fury flashed across the face of
Andersen. He made a movement that caused his interlocutor to step hurriedly backwards. But the emotion passed as rapidly as it had come.

“You would avoid everything,” he said cunningly. “You would avoid everything you hate, if someone—myself for instance—or Luke—made it easy for you to save her from these houses and these churches! Luke will arrange it. He is not like us. He is wise. He knows the world. And you will only have to go on just as before, to burrow and twine! But you’ll have done it. You’ll have saved her from them. And then it will not matter how deep they bury me in the quarries of Leo’s Hill!”

“Is he drunk? Or is he not drunk?” Mr Quincunx wondered. The news of Andersen’s derangement, though it had already run like wild-fire through the village, had not yet reached his ears. For the last few days he had walked both to and from his office, and had talked to no one.

A remarkable peculiarity in this curious
potato-digger
was, however, his absolute and unvarying candour. Mr. Quincunx was prepared to discuss his most private concerns with any mortal or immortal visitor who stepped into his garden. He would have entered into a calm philosophical debate upon his love-affairs with a tramp, with a sailor, with the
postman
, with the chimney-sweep, with the devil; or, as in this case, with his very rival in his sweetheart’s affection! There was really something touching and sublime about this tendency of his. It indicated the presence, in Mr. Quincunx, of a certain mystical reverence for simple humanity, which completely contradicted his misanthropic cynicism.

“Certainly,” he remarked, on this occasion,
forgetting
, in his interest in the subject, the recent strange outburst of his companion. “Certainly, if Lacrima and I had sufficient money to live upon, I would be inclined to risk marrying. You would advise me to, then; wouldn’t you, Andersen? Anyone would advise me to, then. It would be absurd not to do it. Though, all the same, there are always great risks in two people living together, particularly nervous people,—such as we are. But what do you think, Andersen? Suppose some fairy god-mother did give us this money, would you advise us to risk it? Of course, we know, girls like a large house and a lot of servants! She wouldn’t get that with me, because I hate those things, and wouldn’t have them, even if I could afford it. What would you advise, Andersen, if some mad chance did make such a thing possible? Would it be worth the risk?”

An additional motive, in the queerly constituted mind of the recluse, for making this extraordinary request, was the Pariah-like motive of wishing to propitiate the stone-carver. Parallel with his
humorous
love of shocking people, ran, through Mr.
Quincunx’s
nature, the naive and innocent wish to win them over to his side; and his method of realizing this wish was to put himself completely at their mercy, laying his meanest thoughts bare, and abandoning his will to their will, so that for very shame they could not find it in them to injure him, but were softened, thrown off their guard, and disarmed. Mr. Quincunx knew no restraint in these confessions by the way, in these appeals to the voices and omens of casual encounter. He grew voluble, and even
shameless
.
In quiet reaction afterwards, in the loneliness of his cottage, he was often led to regret with
gloomy-remorse
the manner in which he had betrayed himself. It was then that he found himself hating, with the long-brooding hatred of a true solitary, the persons to whom he had exposed the recesses of his soul. At the moment of communicativeness, however, he was never able to draw rein or come to a pause. If he grew conscious that he was making a fool of himself, a curious demonic impulse in him only pressed him on to humiliate himself further.

He derived a queer inverted pleasure from thus offering himself, stripped and naked, to the smiter. It was only afterwards, in the long hours of his
loneliness
, that the poison of his outraged pride festered and fermented, and a deadly malice possessed him towards the recipients of his confidences. There was something admirable about the manner in which this quaint man made, out of his very lack of resistant power, a sort of sanctity of dependence. But this triumph of weakness in him, this dissolution of the very citadel of his being, in so beautiful and mystical an abandonment to the sympathy of our common humanity, was attended by lamentable issues in its resultant hatred and malice. Had Mr. Quincunx been able to give himself up to this touching candour without these melancholy and misanthropic reactions, his temper would have been very nearly the temper of a saint; but the gall and wormwood of the hours that followed, the corroding energy of the goblin of malice that was born of such unnatural humiliations, put a grievous gulf between him and the heavenly condition.

It must also be remembered, in qualification of the outrageousness, one might almost say the indecency, of his appeal to Andersen, that he had not in the remotest degree realized the extent of the
stone-carver’s
infatuation with the Italian. Neither
physical
passion, nor ideal passion, were things that entered into his view of the relations between the sexes. Desire with him was of a strange and complicated subtlety, generally diffused into a mild and brooding sentiment. He was abnormally faithful, but at the same time abnormally cold; and though, very often, jealousy bit him like a viper, it was a jealousy of the mind, not a jealousy of the senses.

What in other people would have been gross and astounding cynicism, was in Mr. Quincunx a perfectly simple and even child-like recognition of elemental facts. He could sweep aside every conventional mask and plunge into the very earth-mould of reality, but he was quite unconscious of any shame, or any merit, in so doing. He simply envisaged facts, and stated the facts he envisaged, without the
conventional
unction of worldly discretion. This being so, it was in no ironic extravagance that he appealed to Andersen, but quite innocently, and without
consciousness
of anything unusual.

Of the two men, some might have supposed, considering the circumstances, that it was Mr.
Quincunx
who was mad, and his interlocutor who was sane. On the other hand, it might be said that only a madman would have received the recluse’s appeal in the calm and serious manner in which Andersen received it. The abysmal cunning of those who have only one object in life, and are in sight of its
attainment
,
actuated the unfortunate stone-carver in his attitude to his rival at this moment.

“If some fairy or some god,” he said, “did lift the stone from her sepulchre and you from your sepulchre, my advice to you and to her would be to go away, to escape, to be free. You would be happy—you would both be happy! And the reason of your happiness would be that you would know the Devil had been conquered. And you would know that, because, by gathering all the stones in the world upon my own head, and being buried beneath them, I should have made a rampart higher than Leo’s Hill to protect you from the Evil One!”