Wood and Stone: A Romance

by John Cowper Powys

An appropriate date at the end of the month had been fixed for the episcopal visit to Nevilton; and the candidates for confirmation were already beginning, according to their various natures and temperaments, to experience that excited anticipation, which, even in the dullest intelligence, such an event arouses.

The interesting ceremony of Gladys Romer’s baptism had been fixed for a week earlier than this, a fanciful sentiment in the agitated mind of Mr. Clavering having led to the selection of this particular day on the strange ground of its exact coincidence with the anniversary of a certain famous saint.

The marriage of Gladys with Dangelis, and of Lacrima with John Goring, was to take place early in September, Mrs. Romer having stipulated for reasons of domestic economy that the two events should be simultaneous.

Another project of some importance to at least three persons in Nevilton, was now, as one might say, in the air; though this was by no means a matter of public knowledge. I refer to Vennie Seldom’s fixed resolution to be received into the Catholic Church and to become a nun.

Ever since her encounter in the village street with the loquacious Mr. Wone, Vennie had been oppressed by an invincible distaste for the things and people that surrounded her. Her longing to give the world the slip and devote herself completely to the religious life had been incalculably deepened by her disgust at what she considered the blasphemous introduction of the Holy Name into the Christian Candidate’s political canvassing. The arguments of Mr. Taxater and the conventional anglicanism of her mother, were, compared with this, only mild incentives to the step she meditated. The whole fabric of her piety and her taste had been shocked to their foundations by the unctuous complacency of Mr. Romer’s evangelical rival.

Vennie felt, as she stood aside, in her retired routine, and watched the political struggle sway to and fro in the village, as though the champions of both causes were odiously and repulsively in the wrong. The sly conservatism of the quarry-owner becoming, since the settlement of the strike, almost fulsome in its flattery of the working classes, struck her as the most unscrupulous bid for power that she had ever encountered; and when, combined with his new pose as the ideal employer and landlord, Mr. Romer introduced the imperial note, and talked lavishly of the economic benefits of the Empire, Vennie felt as though all that was beautiful and sacred in her feeling for the country of her birth, was blighted and poisoned at the root.

But Mr. Wone’s attitude of mind struck her as even more revolting. The quarry-owner was at least frankly and flagrantly cynical. He made no attempt—unless Gladys’ confirmation was to be regarded as such—to conciliate religious sentiment. He never went to church, and in private conversation he expressed his atheistic opinions with humorous and careless shamelessness. But Mr. Wone’s intermingling of Protestant unction with political chicanery struck the passionate soul of the young girl as something very nearly approaching the “unpardonable sin.” Her incisive intelligence, fortified of late by conversations with Mr. Taxater, revolted, too, against the vague ethical verbiage and loose democratic sentiment with which Mr. Wone garnished his lightest talk. Since Philip’s release from prison and his reappearance in the village, she had taken the opportunity of having several interviews with the Christian Candidate’s son, and these interviews, though they saddened and perplexed her, increased her respect for the young man in proportion as they diminished it for his father. With true feminine instinct Vennie found the anarchist more attractive than the socialist, and the atheist less repugnant than the missionary.

One afternoon, towards the end of the first week in August, Vennie persuaded Mr. Taxater to accompany her on a long walk. They made their way through the wood which separates the fields around Nevilton Mount from the fields around Leo’s Hill. Issuing from this wood, along the path followed by every visitor to the hill who wishes to avoid its steeper slopes, they strolled leisurely between the patches of high bracken-fern and looked down upon the little church of Athelston.

Athelston was a long, rambling village, encircling the northern end of the Leonian promontory and offering shelter, in many small cottages all heavily built of the same material, to those of the workmen in the quarries who were not domiciled in Nevilton.

“It would be rather nice,” said Vennie to the theologian, “if it wouldn’t spoil our walk, to go and look at that carving in the porch, down there. They say it has been cleaned lately, and the figures show up more clearly.”