Wood and Stone: A Romance

by John Cowper Powys

June was drawing to an end, and the days, though still free from rain, grew less and less bright. A thin veil of greyish vapour, which never became thick enough or sank low enough to resolve itself into definite clouds, offered a perpetual hindrance to the shining of the sun. The sun was present. Its influence was felt in the warmth of the air; but when it became visible, it was only in the form of a large misty disc, at which the weakest eyes might gaze without distress or discomfort.

On a certain evening when this vaporous obscurity made it impossible to ascertain the exact moment of the sun’s descent and when it might be said that afternoon became twilight before men or cattle realized that the day was over, Mr. Wone was assisting his son Philip in planting geraniums in his back garden.

The Wone house was neither a cottage nor a villa. It was one of those nondescript and modest residences, which, erected in the mid-epoch of Victoria’s reign, when money was circulating freely among the middle-classes, win a kind of gentle secondary mellowness in the twentieth century by reason of something solid and liberal in their original construction. It stood at the corner of the upper end of Nevilton, where, beyond the fountain-square, the road from Yeoborough takes a certain angular turn to the north. The garden at the back of it, as with many of the cottages of the place, was larger than might have been expected, and over the low hedge which separated it from the meadows behind, the long ridge of wooded upland, with its emphatic lines of tall Scotch firs that made the southern boundary of the valley, was pleasantly and reassuringly visible.

Philip Wone worked in Yeoborough. He was a kind of junior partner in a small local firm of tombstone makers—the very firm, in fact, which under the direction of the famous Gideon, had constructed the most remarkable monument in Nevilton churchyard. It was doubtful whether he would ever attain the position of full partner in this concern, for his manner of life was eccentric, and neither his ways nor his appearance were those of a youth who succeeds in business. He was a tall pallid creature. His dark coarse hair fell in a heavy wave over his white forehead, and his hands were thin and delicate as the hands of an invalid.

He was an omnivorous reader and made incessant use of every subscription library that Yeoborough offered. His reading was of two kinds. He read romantic novels of every sort—good, bad, and indifferent—and he read the history of revolutions. There can hardly have been, in any portion of the earth’s surface, a revolution with whose characters and incidents Philip was unacquainted. His chief passion was for the great French Revolution, the personalities of which were more real to him than the majority of his own friends.

Philip was by temperament and conviction an ardent anarchist; not an anarchist of Mr. Quincunx’s mild and speculative type, but of a much more formidable brand. He had also long ago consigned the idea of any Providential interference with the sequence of events upon earth, into the limbo of outworn superstitions.

It was Philip’s notion, this, of planting geraniums in the back-garden. Dressed nearly always in black, and wearing a crimson tie, it was his one luxurious sensuality to place in his button-hole, as long as they were possibly available, some specimen or other of the geranium tribe, with a preference for the most flaming varieties.

The Christian Candidate regarded his son with a mixture of contempt and apprehension. He despised his lack of business ability, and he viewed his intellectual opinions as the wilful caprices of a sulky and disagreeable temper.

It was as a sort of pitying concession to the whim of a lunatic that Mr. Wone was now assisting Philip in planting these absurd geraniums. His own idea was that flower-gardens ought to be abolished altogether. He associated them with gentility and toryism and private property in land. Under the régime he would have liked to have established, all decent householders would have had liberal small holdings, where they would grow nothing but vegetables. Mr. Wone liked vegetables and ate of them very freely in their season. Flowers he regarded as the invention of the upper classes, so that their privately owned world might be decorated with exclusive festoons.

“I shall go round presently,” he said to his son, “and visit all these people. I see no reason why Taxater and Clavering, as well as the two Andersens, should not make themselves of considerable use to me. I am tired of talking to these Leo’s Hill labourers. One day they will strike, and the next they won’t. All they think of is their own quarrel with Lickwit. They have no thought of the general interest of the country.”