Wood and Stone (8 page)

“I will do my best,” said the scholar. “I will do my best.” And indicating to Vennie, who was
absorbed
in her nervous gratitude, the near approach
of the object of their saintly conspiracy, he led her forward to meet the young clergyman with an
appropriate
air of friendly and casual nonchalance.

“I am sorry to have to say it,” was Mr. Clavering’s greeting, “but that farmer-fellow is the only person in my parish for whom I have a complete detestation. I wish to goodness Mr. Romer had never brought him into the place!”

“I don’t like the look of his back, I must say,” answered the theologian, following with his eyes the retreating figure of Mr. John Goring.

“He is,” said the young priest, “without exception the most repulsive human being I have ever met in my life. Our worthy Romer is an angel of light compared with him.”

With Mr. Goring still as their topic, they strolled amicably together towards the same gap in the hedge, through which the apologist of the papacy had emerged an hour before. There they separated, Vennie returning to the vicarage, and the young clergyman carrying off Mr. Taxater to supper with him in his house by the church.

Clavering’s establishment consisted of a
middle-aged
woman of inordinate volubility, and the woman’s daughter, a girl of twelve.

The supper offered by the priest to his guest was “light and choice”—nor did it lack its mellow accompaniment of carefully selected, if not “Attic,” wine. Of this wine Mr. Taxater did not hesitate to partake freely, sitting, when the meal was over, opposite his host at the open window, through which the pleasant murmurs of the evening, and the voices of the village-street, soothingly and harmoniously floated.

The famous theologian was in an excellent temper. Rich recondite jests pursued one another from his smiling lips, and his white hands folded themselves complacently above the cross on his watch-chain.

Lottie Fringe, the child of Clavering’s servant, tripped sportively in and out of the room, encouraged in her girlish coquetries by the amiable scholar. She was not yet too old to be the kittenish plaything of the lighter moments of a wise and scholarly man, and it was pleasant to watch the zest with which the vicar’s visitor entered into her sportive audacities. Mr. Taxater made her fill and refill his glass, and taking her playfully on his knee, kissed her and fondled her many times. It was the vicar himself, who finally, a little embarrassed by these levities, sent the girl off to the kitchen, apologizing to his guest for the freedom she displayed.

“Do not apologize, dear Mr. Clavering,” said the theologian. “I love all children, especially when they are girls. There is something about the kisses of a young girl—at once amorous and innocent—which reconciles one to the universe, and keeps death at a distance. Could one for a moment think of death, when holding a young thing, so full of life and beauty, on one’s knee?”

The young priest’s face clouded. “To be quite honest with you, Mr. Taxater,” he murmured, in a troubled voice, “I cannot say that I altogether agree. We are both unconventional people, so I may speak freely. I do not think that one does a child any good by encouraging her to be playful and forward, in that particular way. You live with your books; but I live with my people, and I have
known so many sad cases of girls being completely ruined by getting a premature taste for coquetry of that kind.”

“I am afraid, my friend,” answered Mr. Taxater, “that the worst of all heresies is lodged deep in your heart.”

“Heresies? God knows,” sighed the priest, “I have enough evil in my heart—but heresies? I am at a loss to catch your meaning.”

In the absence of his playful Clerica—to use the Pantagruelian allusion—the great Homenas of
Nevilton
was compelled to fill his “tall-boy of extravagant wine” with his own hand. He did so, and continued his explanation.

“By the worst of all heresies I mean the dangerous Puritan idea that pleasure itself is evil and a thing detestable to God. The Catholic doctrine, as I understand it, is that all these things are entirely relative to the persons concerned. Pleasure in itself is, in the Aristotelian sense, a supreme good.
Everyone
has a right to it. Everyone must have it. The whole thing is a matter of proportion and expediency. If an innocent playful game, of the kind you have just witnessed, was likely in this definite particular case to lead to harm, then you would be justified in your anxiety. But there must be no laying down of hard general rules. There must be no making a virtue of the mere denying ourselves pleasure.”

Mr. Clavering could hardly wait for his guest to finish.

“Then, according to your theory,” he exclaimed, “it would be right for you, or whoever you will,—pardon my making the thing so personal—to indulge
in casual levities with any pretty barmaid, as long as you vaguely surmised that she was a sensible girl and would not be harmed?

“Certainly it would be right,” replied the papal apologist, sipping his wine and inhaling the perfume of the garden, “and not only right, but a plain duty. It is our duty, Mr. Clavering, to make the world happier while we live in it; and the way to make girls happier, especially when their occupations are laborious, is to kiss them; to give them innocent and admiring embraces.”

“I am afraid you are not quite serious, Mr.
Taxater
,” said the clergyman. “I have an absurd way of being direct and literal in these discussions.”

Certainly, I am serious. Do you not know—young puritan—that some of the noblest spirits in history have not hesitated to increase the pleasure of girls’ lives by giving them frequent kisses? In the Greek days he who could give the most charming kiss was awarded a public prize. In the Elizabethan days all the great and heroic souls, whose exquisite wit and passionate imagination put us still to shame, held large and liberal views on this matter. In the eighteenth century the courtly and moral Joseph Addison used never to leave a coffee-house, however humble and poor, without bestowing a friendly embrace upon every woman in it. The religious Doctor Johnson—a man of your own faith—was notoriously in the habit of taking his prettier visitors upon his knee, and tenderly kissing them. It is no doubt due to this fact, that the great lexicographer was so frequently visited;—especially by young Quakers. When we come to our own age, it is well
known that the late Archbishop Taraton, the refuter of Darwin, was never so happy as when romping round the raspberry-canes in his garden with a crowd of playful girls.

“These great and wise men have all recognized the fact that pleasure is not an evil but a good. A good, however, that must be used discreetly and according to the Christian self-control of which God has given his Church the secret. The senses are not under a curse, Mr. Clavering. They are not given us simply to tempt and perplex us. They are given for our wise and moderate enjoyment.”

Francis Taxater once more lifted his glass to his lips.

“To the devil with this Protestant Puritanism of yours! It has darkened the sun in heaven. It is the cause of all the squalid vice and gross excesses of our forlorn England. It is the cause of the deplorable perversities that one sees around one. It is the cause of that odious hypocrisy that makes us the laughing-stock of the great civilized nations of France, Italy and Spain.” The theologian drew a deep breath, and continued. “I notice, Mr. Clavering, that you have by your side, still
unfinished
, your second glass of wine. That is a
mistake
. That is an insult to Providence. Whatever may be your attitude towards these butterfly-wenches, it cannot, as a matter of poetic economy, be right to leave a wine, as delicate, as delicious as this, to spoil in the glass.

“I suppose it has never occurred to you, Mr.
Clavering
, to go and sit, with the more interesting of your flock, at the Seldom Arms? It never has? So I
imagined from my knowledge of your uncivilized English ways.

“The European café, sir, is the universal school of refined and intellectual pleasure. It was from his seat in a Roman café—a place not unknown to me myself—that the great Gibbon was accustomed to survey the summer moon, rising above the Pantheon.

“It is the same in the matter of wine as in the other matter. It is your hypocritical and puritanical fear of pleasure that leads to the gross imbibing of
villainous
spirits and the subterranean slavery of
prostitution
. If you allowed yourselves, freely, naturally, and with Christian moderation, to enjoy the admirable gifts of the supreme giver, there would no longer be any need for this deplorable plunging into insane vice. As it is—in this appalling country of yours—one can understand every form of debauchery.”

At this point Mr. Clavering intervened with an eager and passionate question. He had been listening intently to his visitor’s words, and his clear-cut, mobile face had changed its expression more than once during this long discourse.

“You do not, then, think,” said he, in a tone of something like supplication, “that there is anything wrong in giving ourselves up to the intense emotion which the presence of beauty and charm is able to excite?”

“Wrong?” said Mr. Taxater. “It is wrong to suppress such feelings! It is all a matter of
proportion
, my good sir, a matter of proportion and
common
sense. A little psychological insight will soon make us aware whether the emotion you speak of is
likely to prove injurious to the object of our
admiration
.

“But oneself—what about oneself?” cried the young priest. “Is there not a terrible danger, in all these things, lest one’s spiritual ideal should become blurred and blighted?”

To this question Mr. Taxater returned an answer so formidable and final, that the conversation was brought to an abrupt close.

“What,” he said, “has God given us the Blessed Sacraments for?”

Hugh Clavering escorted his visitor to the corner of the street and bade him good-night there. As he re-entered his little garden, he turned for a moment to look at the slender tower of St. Catharine’s church, rising calm and still into the hot June sky. Between him and it, flitted like the ghost of a dead Thaïs or Phryne, the pallid shadow of an impassioned
temptress
holding out provocative arms. The form of the figure seemed woven of all the vapours of unbridled poetic fantasy, but the heavy yellow hair which most of all hid the tower from his view was the hair of Gladys Romer.

The apologist of the papacy strolled slowly and meditatively back to his own house with the easy step of one who was in complete harmony both with gods and men. Above him the early stars began, one by one, to shine down upon the earth, but as he glanced up towards them, removing his hat and passing his hand across his forehead, the great diplomatist appeared quite untroubled by the ineffable littleness of all earthly considerations, under the
remoteness
of those austere watchers.

The barking of dogs, in distant unknown yards, the melancholy cry of new-shorn lambs, somewhere far across the pastures, the soft, low, intermittent breathing, full of whispers and odours, of the whole mysterious night, seemed only to throw Mr. Taxater back more completely and securely upon that firm ecclesiastical tradition which takes the hearts of men in its hands and turns them away from the Outer Darkness.

He let himself quietly into the Gables garden, by the little gate in the wall, and entered his house. He was surprised to find the door unlocked and a light burning in the kitchen. The careful Mrs. Wotnot was accustomed to retire to rest at a much earlier hour. He found the good woman extended at full length upon three hard chairs, her head supported by a bundle of shawls. She was suffering from one of her chronic rheumatic attacks, and was in
considerable
distress.

To a less equable and humane spirit there might have been something rather irritating than pathetic about this unexpected finale to a harmonious day. But Mr. Taxater’s face expressed no sign of any
feeling
but that of grave and gentle concern.

With some difficulty, for the muscles of her body were twisted by nervous spasms, the theologian
supported
the old woman up the stairs, to her room under the eaves. Here he laid her upon the bed, and for the rest of the night refused to leave her room, rubbing with his white plump hands her thin old legs, and applying brandy to her lips at the moments when the nervous contractions that assailed her seemed most extreme. The delicate light of dawn
showed its soft bluish pallour at the small casemented window before the old lady fell asleep; but it was not till relieved by a woman who appeared, several hours later, with their morning’s milk, that the defender of the Catholic Faith in Nevilton retired to his well-earned repose.

M
R. QUINCUNX was digging in his garden. The wind, a little stronger than on the previous days and still blowing from the east, buffeted his attenuated figure and ruffled his pointed beard, tinged with premature grey. He dug up all manner of weeds, some large, some small, and shaking them carefully free of the adhesive earth, flung them into a wheel-barrow by his side.

It was approaching noon, and in spite of the chilly gusts of wind, the sun beat down hotly upon the exposed front of Dead Man’s Cottage. Every now and then Mr. Quincunx would leave his work; and retiring into his kitchen, proceed with elaborate nicety to stir a small pot of broth which simmered over the fire. He was a queer mixture of epicurean preciseness and ascetic indifference in these matters, but, on the whole, the epicurean tendency
predominated
, owing to a subtle poetic passion in the eccentric man, for the symbolic charm of all these little
necessities
of life. The lighting of his fire in the morning, the crackling of the burning sticks, and their fragrant smell, gave Mr. Quincunx probably as much pleasure as anything else in the world.

Every bowl of that fresh milk and brown bread, which, prepared with meticulous care, formed his
staple diet, was enjoyed by him with more
ceremonious
concentration than most gourmands devote to their daintiest meat and wine.

The broiling of his chicken on Sunday was a function of solemn ritual. Mr. Quincunx bent over the bird, basting it with butter, in the absorbed manner of a priest preparing the sacrament.

The digging up of onions or lettuces in his garden, and the stripping them of their outer leaves, was a ceremony to be performed in no light or casual haste, but with a prepared and concentrated spirit.

No profane hand ever touched the little canister of tea from which Mr. Quincunx, at the same precise hour every day, replenished his tea-pot.

In all these material things his scrupulous and
punctilious
nicety never suffered the smallest diminution. His mind might be agitated to a point bordering upon despair, but he still, with mechanical foresight, sawed the fagots in his wood-shed and drew the water from his well.

As he pulled up weed after weed, on this particular morning, his mind was in a state of extreme nervous agitation. Mr. Romer had called him up the night before to the House, and had announced that his present income—the sum regarded by the recluse as absolutely secure—was now entirely to cease, and in the place of it he was destined to receive, in return for horrible clerical work performed in Yeoborough, a considerably smaller sum, as Mr. Romer’s paid dependent.

The idea of working in an office was more
distasteful
to Mr. Quincunx than it is possible to indicate to any person not actually acquainted with him. His
exquisitely characteristic hand, admirably adapted to the meticulous diary he had kept for years, was entirely unsuited to competing with type-writing machines and machine-like type-writers. The walk to Yeoborough too,—a matter of some four or five miles—loomed upon him as a hideous purgatory. Walking tired him much more than working in his garden; and he had a nervous dread of those casual encounters and salutations on the way, which the habitual use of the same road to one’s work
necessarily
must imply.

His mind anticipated with hideous minuteness every detail of his future dreary life. He
decided
that even at the cost of the sacrifice of the last of his little luxuries he would make a point of going one way at least by train. That walk, twice a day, through the depressing suburbs of Yeoborough was more than he could bear to contemplate. It was characteristic of him that he never for a moment considered the possibility of an appeal to law. Law and lawyers were for Mr. Quincunx, with his instincts of an amiable anarchist, simply the engines through which the rich and powerful worked their will upon the weak and helpless.

It was equally characteristic of him that it never entered his head to throw up his cottage, pack his scanty possessions and seek his fortune in another place. It was not only Lacrima that held him from such a resolution. It was as impossible for him to think of striking out in a new soil as it would have been for an aged frog to leave the pond of its nativity and sally forth across the fields in search of new waters. It was this inability to “strike out” and
grapple with the world on equal terms, that had led, in the beginning, to his curious relation to the Romers. He clung to Susan Romer for no other reason than that she supplied a link between his past and his present.

His lips trembled with anger and his hand shook, as he recalled the interview of the preceding night. The wife had annoyed him almost more than the husband. His brutality had been gross and frank. The lascivious joy of a strong nature, in deliberately outraging a weaker one, had gleamed forth from his jeering eyes.

But there had been an unction, an hypocritical sentimentality, about Mrs. Romer’s tone, that had made him hate her the more bitterly of the two. The fact that she also—stupid lump of fawning obesity as she was!—was a victim of this imperial tyrant, did not in the least assuage him. The helot who is under the lash hates the helot who crouches by the master’s chair, more deeply than he hates the master. It is because of this unhappy law of nature that there are so few successful revolts among our social Pariahs. The well-constituted ruler of men divides his serfs into those who hold the whip and those who are whipped. Yes, he hated her the most. But how he hated them both!

The heart of your true Pariah is a strange and dark place, concealing depths of rancorous animosity, which those who over-ride and discount such feelings rarely calculate upon. It is a mistake to assume that this curious role—the role of being a Pariah upon our planet—is one confined to the submerged, the outcast, the criminal.

There are Pariahs in every village. It might be said that there are Pariahs in every family. The Pariah is one who is born with an innate inability to deal vigorously and effectively with his fellow animals. One sees these unfortunates every day—on the street, in the office, at the domestic hearth. One knows them by the queer look in their eyes; the look of animals who have been crushed rather than tamed.

It is not only that they are weaker than the rest and less effectual. They are
different
. It is in their difference that the tragedy of their fate lies.
Commonplace
weaklings, who are not born Pariahs, have in their hearts the same standards, the same
ambitions
, the same prejudices, as those who rule the world. Such weaklings venerate, admire, and even
love
the strong unscrupulous hands, the crafty
unscrupulous
brains, who push them to and fro like pawns.

But the Pariah does not venerate the Power that oppresses him. He despises it and hates it. Long-accumulated loathing rankles in his heart. He is crushed but not won. He is penned, like a shorn sheep; but his thoughts “wander through Eternity.”

And it is this difference, separating him from the rest, that excites such fury in those who oppress him. The healthy-minded prosperous man is irritated
beyond
endurance by this stranger within the gate—this incorrigible, ineffectual critic, cumbering his road. The mob, too, always ready, like spiteful, cawing rooks, to fall upon a wounded comrade, howl
remorselessly
for his destruction. The Pariah is seldom able to retain the sweetness of his natural affections.

Buffetted by the unconscious brutality of those about him, he retorts with conscious and
unfathomable
hatred. His soul festers and gangrenes within him, and the loneliness of his place among his
fellows
leads him to turn upon them all—like a rat in a gin. The pure-minded capable man, perceiving the rancorous misanthropy of this sick spirit, longs to trample him into the mud, to obliterate him, to forget him. But the man whose strength and
cunning
is associated with lascivious perversity, wishes to have him by his side, to humiliate, to degrade, to outrage. A taste to be surrounded by Pariahs is an interesting peculiarity of a certain successful class. Such companionship is to them a perpetual and pleasing reminder of their own power.

Mr. Quincunx was a true Pariah in his miserable combination of inability to strike back at the people who injured him, and inability to forget their injuries. He propitiated their tastes, bent to their will,
conciliated
their pride, agreed with their opinions, and hated them with demoniacal hatred.

As he pulled up his weeds in the hot sun, this particular morning, Maurice Quincunx fantastically consoled himself by imagining all manner of disasters to his enemies. Every time he touched with his hands the soft-crumbling earth, he uttered a kind of half-conscious prayer that, in precisely such a way, the foundations of Nevilton House should crumble and yield. Under his hat—for he was hypochondriacally apprehensive about sunstrokes—flapped and waved in the wind a large cabbage leaf, placed carefully at the back of his head to protect his neck as he bent down. The shadow of this cabbage leaf, as it was
thrown across the dusty path, assumed singular and sinister shapes, giving the impression sometimes that the head of Mr. Quincunx was gnome-like or
goblin-like
in its proportions.

Perhaps the most unfortunate characteristic of Pariahs is that though they cling instinctively to one another they are irritated and provoked by each other’s peculiarities.

This unhappy tendency was now to receive sad confirmation in our weed-puller’s case, for he was suddenly interrupted by the appearance at his gate of Lacrima Traffio.

He rose to meet her, and without inviting her to pass the entrance, for he was extremely nervous of village gossip, and one never knew what a casual passer-by might think, he leant over the low wall and talked with her from that security.

She seemed in a very depressed and pitiable mood and the large dark eyes that fixed themselves upon her friend’s face were full of an inarticulate appeal.

“I cannot endure it much longer,” she said. “It gets worse and worse every day.”

Maurice Quincunx knew perfectly well what she meant, but the curious irritation to which I have just referred drove him to rejoin:

“What gets worse?”

“Their unkindness,” answered the girl with a quick reproachful look, “their perpetual unkindness.”

“But they feed you well, don’t they?” said the hermit, removing his hat and rearranging the
cabbage-leaf
so as to adapt it to the new angle of the sun. “And they don’t beat you. You haven’t to scrub floors or mend clothes. People, like you and I, must
be thankful for being allowed to eat and sleep at all on this badly-arranged earth.”

“I keep thinking of Italy,” murmured Lacrima. “I think it is your English ways that trouble me. I don’t believe—I can’t believe—they always mean to be unkind. But English people are so heartless!”

“You seemed to like that Andersen fellow well enough,” grumbled Mr. Quincunx.

“How can you be so silly, Maurice?” cried the girl, slipping through the gate in spite of its owner’s furtive glances down the road. “How can you be so silly?”

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.