Wood and Stone: A Romance

by John Cowper Powys

Mr. Wone had long been at work among the Leo’s Hill quarry-men, encouraging them to strike. Until the second week in July his efforts had been fruitless; but with the change in the weather to which we have referred, the strike came. It had already lasted some seven or eight days, when a Saturday arrived which had been selected, several months before, for a great political gathering on the summit of Leo’s Hill. This was a meeting of radicals and socialists to further the cause of Mr. Wone’s campaign.

Leo’s Hill had been, for many generations, the site of such local gatherings. These gatherings were not confined to political demonstrators. They were usually attended by circus-men and other caterers to proletarian amusement; and were often quite as lively, in their accompaniments of feasting and festivity, as any country fair.

The actual speaking took place at the extreme northern end of the hill, where there was a singular and convenient feature, lending itself to such assemblies, in the formation of the ground. This was the grassy outline, still emphasizing quite distinctly its ancient form, of the military Roman amphitheatre attached to the camp. Locally the place was known as “the Frying-pan”, from its marked and grotesque resemblance to that utensil; but no base culinary appellation, issue of Anglo-Saxon unimaginativeness, could conceal the formidable classic moulding of its well-known shape—the shape of the imperial colisseum.

Between the Frying-pan and the southern side of the hill, where the bulk of the quarries were, rose a solitary stone building. One hardly expected the presence of such a building in such a place, for it was a considerable-sized inn; but the suitableness of the grassy expanses of the ancient camp for all manner of tourist-jaunts accounted for its erection; and doubtless it served a good purpose in softening with interludes of refreshment the labours of the quarry-men.

It was the presence of this admirable tavern so near the voice of the orator, that led Mr. Romer, himself, to stroll, on that Saturday, in the direction of his rival’s demonstration. Though the more considerable of his quarries were at the southern end of the hill, certain new excavations, in the success of which he took exceptional interest, had been latterly made in its very centre, and within a stone’s throw of the tavern-door. The great cranes, used in this new invasion, stood out against the sky from the highest part of the hill, and assumed, especially at sunset, when their shape was rendered most emphatic, the form of enormous compasses, planted there by some gigantic architectural hand.

It was in relation to these new works that Mr. Romer, towards the close of the afternoon, found himself advancing along the narrow path that led, between clumps of bracken and furze-bushes, from the most westward of his woods to the hill’s base. Mr. Lickwit had informed him that there was talk, among some of the more intransigent of the Yeoborough socialists, about destroying these cranes. Objections had been brought against them, in recent newspaper articles, on purely æsthetic grounds. It was said they disfigured the classic outline of the hill, and interfered with a landmark which had been a delight to every eye for unnumbered ages.

It was hardly to be supposed that the more official of the supporters of Mr. Wone would condone any such outbreak. It was unlikely that Wone himself would do so. The “Christian Candidate,” as his Methodist friends called him, was in no way a man of violence. But the fact that there had been this pseudo-public criticism of the works from an unpolitical point of view might lend colour to any sort of scandal. There were plenty of bold spirits among the by-streets of Yeoborough who would have loved nothing better than to send Mr. Romer’s cranes toppling over into a pit, and indeed it was the sort of adventure which would draw all the more restless portion of the meeting’s audience. The possibility was the more threatening because the presence of this kind of general fair attracted to the hill all manner of heterogeneous persons quite unconnected with the locality.

But what really influenced Mr. Romer in making his own approach to the spot, was the neighbourhood of the Half Moon. Where there was drink, he argued, people would get drunk; and where people got drunk, anything might happen. He had instituted Mr. Lickwit to remain on guard at the eastern works; and he had written to the superintendent of police suggesting the advisability of special precautions. But he felt nervous and ill at ease as he listened, from his Nevilton terrace, to the distant shouts and clamour carried to him on the west wind; and true to his Napoleonic instincts, he proceeded, without informing anyone of his intention, straight to the zone of danger.

The afternoon was very hot, though there was no sun. The wind blew in threatening gusts, and the quarry-owner noticed that the distant Quantock Moors were overhung with a dark bank of lowering clouds. It was one of those sinister days that have the power of taking all colour and all interest out of the earth’s surface. The time of the year lent itself gloomily to this sombre unmasking. The furze-bushes looked like dead things. Many of them had actually been burnt in some wanton conflagration; and their prickly branches carried warped and blighted seeds. The bracken, near the path, had been dragged and trodden. Here and there its stalks protruded like thin amputated arms. The elder-bushes, caught in the wind, showed white and metallic, as if all their leaves had been dipped in some brackish water. All the trees seemed to have something of this dull, whitish glare, which did not prevent them from remaining, in the recesses of their foliage, as drearily dark as the dark dull soil beneath them. The grass of the fields had a look congruous with the rest of the scene; a look as if it had been one large velvety pall, drawn over the whole valley.

In the valley itself, along the edges of this grassy hall, the tall clipped elm-trees stood like mourning sentinels bowing towards their dead. Drifting butterflies, principally of the species known as the “Lesser Heath” and the “Meadow-Brown,” whirled past his feet as he walked, in troubled and tarnished helplessness. Here and there a weak dilapidated currant-moth, the very epitome of surrender to circumstance, tried in vain to arrest its enforced flight among the swaying stalks of grey melancholy thistles, the only living things who seemed to find the temper of the day congenial with their own.