Wood and Stone: A Romance

by John Cowper Powys

The affair being thus settled, the geraniums were abandoned; and while the father proceeded down the village towards the Gables, the son mounted the slope of the hill in the direction of Wild Pine.

The path Philip followed soon became a narrow lane running between two high sandy banks, overtopped by enormous beeches. At all hours, and on every kind of day, this miniature gorge between the wooded fields was a dark and forlorn spot. On an evening of a day like the present one, it was nothing less than sinister. The sky being doubly dark above, dark with the coming on of night, and dark with the persistent cloud-veil, the accumulated shadows of this sombre road intensified the gloom to a pitch of darkness capable of exciting, in agitated nerves, an emotion bordering upon terror. Though the sun had barely sunk over Leo’s Hill, between these ivy-hung banks it was as obscure as if night had already fallen.

But the obscurity of Root-Thatch Lane was nothing to the sombreness that awaited him when, arrived at the hill-top, he entered Nevil’s Gully. This was a hollow basin of close-growing beech-trees, surrounded on both sides by impenetrable thickets of bramble and elder, and crossed by the path that led to Wild Pine cottages. Every geographical district has its typical and representative centre,—some characteristic spot which sums up, as it were, and focuses, in limited bounds, qualities and attributes that are diffused in diverse proportions through the larger area. Such a centre of the Nevilton district was the place through which Philip Wone now hurried.

Nevil’s Gully, however dry the weather, was never free from an overpowering sense of dampness. The soil under foot was now no longer sand but clay, and clay of a particularly adhesive kind. The beech roots, according to their habit, had created an empty space about them—a sort of blackened floor, spotted with green moss and pallid fungi. Out of this, their cold, smooth trunks emerged, like silent pillars in the crypt of a mausoleum.

The most characteristic thing, as we have noted, in the scenery of Nevilton, is its prevalent weight of heavy oppressive moisture. For some climatic or geographical reason the foliage of the place seems chillier, damper, and more filled with oozy sap, than in other localities of the West of England. Though there may have been no rain for weeks—as there had been none this particular June—the woods in this district always give one the impression of retaining an inordinate reserve of atmospheric moisture. It is this moisture, this ubiquitous dampness, that to a certain type of sun-loving nature makes the region so antipathetic, so disintegrating. Such persons have constantly the feeling of being dragged earthward by some steady centripedal pull, against which they struggle in vain. Earthward they are pulled, and the earth, that seems waiting to receive them, breathes heavy damp breaths of in-drawing voracity, like the mouth of some monster of the slime.

And if this is true of the general conditions of Nevilton geography, it is especially and accumulatively true of Nevil’s Gully, which, for some reason or other, is a very epitome of such sinister gravitation. If one’s latent mortality feels the drag of its clayish affinity in all quarters of this district, in Nevil’s Gully it becomes conscious of such oppression as a definite demonic presence. For above the Gully and above the cottages to which the Gully leads, the umbrageous mass of entangled leafiness hangs, fold upon fold, as if it had not known the woodman’s axe since the foot of man first penetrated these recesses. The beeches, to which reference has been made, are overtopped on the higher ground by ashes and sycamores, and these, in their turn, are surmounted, on the highest level of all, by colossal Scotch firs, whose forlorn grandeur gives the cottages their name.

Philip hurried, in the growing darkness, across the sepulchral gully, and pushed open the gate of the secluded cattle-yard which was the original cause of this human hamlet. The houses of men in rural districts follow the habitations of beasts. Where cattle and the stacks that supply their food can conveniently be located, there must the dwelling be of those whose business it is to tend them. The convenience of Wild Pine as a site for a spacious and protected farm-yard was sufficient reason for the erection of a human shelter for the hands by whose labour such places are maintained.

He crossed the yard with quick steps. A light burned in one of the sheds, throwing a fitful flicker upon the heaps of straw and the pools of dung-coloured water. Some animal, there—a horse or a cow or a pig—was probably giving birth to young.

From the farm-yard he emerged into the cottage-garden, and stumbling across this, he knocked at the first door he reached. There was not the least sound in answer. Dead unbroken stillness reigned, except for an intermittent shuffling and stamping from the watcher or the watched in the farm-yard behind.